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ON ENGLISH POETRY 

Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology 
of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective 



By ROBERT GRAVES 




New Yok ALFRED • A • KNOPF Mciaxn 



COPYBIGHT, 1922, BY 
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 

Published, May, 19n 



•Grn 



Set up and printed hy the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, K. Y. 
Paper furnished ly Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y. 
Bound ly the H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y. 

MANUrACTTBKD IN THB VNITBD STATES OT AMERICA 



^ JUN -2 1922 

©CI.A661951 



To T. E. Lawrence of Arabia and 
All SouVs College, Oxford, and to 
W. H. R. Rivers of the Solomon Is- 
lands and St. Johns College, Cam- 
bridge, my gratitude for valuable 
critical help, and the dedication of 
this book. 



. . . Also of the Mustarde Tarte: Suche 
problemis to paynt, it longyth to his arte. 

John Skelton. 

Poetry subdues to union under its light yoke 
all irreconcilable things. 

P. B. Shelley. 



NOTE 

The greater part of this book will appear con- 
troversial, but any critic who expects me to argue on 
what I have written, is begged kindly to excuse me; 
my garrison is withdrawn without a shot fired and his 
artillery may blow the fortress to pieces at leisure. 
j These notebook reflections are only off^ered as being 
Dased on the rules which regulate my own work at 
the moment, for many of which I claim no universal 
application and have promised no lasting regard. 
They have been suggested from time to time mostly 
by particular problems in the writing of my last two 
volumes of poetry. Hesitating to formulate at present 
a comprehensivewater-tight philosophy of poetry, I 
have dispensed with a continuous argument, and so 
the sections either stand independently or are in- 
tended to get their force by suggestive neighbourliness 
rather than by logical catenation. The names of the 
glass houses in which my name as an authority on 
poetry lodges at present, are to be found on a back 
page. 

It is a heartbreaking task to reconcile literary and 
scientific interests in the same book. Literary en- 

vii 



NOTE 

thusiasts seem to regard poetry as something mirac- 
ulous, something which it is almost blasphemous to 
analyse, witness the outcry against R. L. Stevenson 
when he merely underlined examples of Shakes- 
peare's wonderful dexterity in the manipulation of 
consonants; 'most scientists on the other hand, being 
either benevolently contemptuous of poetry, or if in- 
terested, insensitive to the emotional quality of words 
and their associative subtleties, themselves use words 
as weights and counters rather than as chemi- 
cals powerful in combination and have written, if at 
all, so boorishly about poetry that the breach has been 
actually widened. If any false scientific assump- 
tions or any bad literary blunders I have made, be 
held up for popular execration, these may yet act as 
decoys to the truth which I am anxious to buy even 
at the price of a snubbing; and where in many cases 
no trouble has apparently been taken to check over- 
statements, there is this excuse to offer, that when 
putting a cat among pigeons it is always advisable to 
make it as large a cat as possible. 

R.G. 
Islip, 
Oxford. 



CONTENTS 

I DEFINITIONS, 13 

II THE NINE MUSES, 15 

III POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC, 19 

IV CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS, 22 

V THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH, 24 

VI INSPIRATION, 26 

VII THE PARABLE OF MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR, 

27 

VIII THE CARPENTER'S SON, 31 

IX THE GADDING VINE, 33 

X THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM, 36 

XI SPENSER'S CUFFS, 38 

XII CONNECTION OF POETRY AND HUMOUR, 40 

XIII DICTION, 41 

XIV THE DAFFODILS, 42 
XV VERS LIBRE, 45 

XVI MOVING MOUNTAINS, 50 

XVII LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI, 50 

XVIII THE GENERAL ELUOTT, 55 

XIX THE GOD CALLED POETRY, 62 

XX LOGICALIZATION, 66 

XXI LBHTATIONS, 69 

XXII THE NAUGHTY BOY, 71 

XXm THE CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC IDEAS, 72 

XXIV COLOUR, 76 

XXV PUTTY, 78 



CONTENTS 

XXVI READING ALOUD. 81 

XXVII L'ARTE DELLA PITTURA, 82 

XXVIII ON WRITING MUSICALLY, 83 

XXIX THE USE OF POETRY, 84 

XXX HISTORIES OF POETRY, 86 

XXXI THE BOWL MARKED DOG, 87 

XXXII THE ANALYTIC SPIRIT, 88 

XXXm RHYME AND ALLITERATION, 89 

XXXIV AN AWKWARD FELLOW CALLED ARIPHRADES, 90 

XXXV IMPROVISING NEW CONVENTIONS, 92 

XXXVI WHEN IN DOUBT . . . , 93 

XXXVII THE EDITOR WITH THE MUCKRAKE, 94 

XXXVIII THE MORAL QUESTION, 94 

XXXIX THE POET AS OUTSIDER, 96 

XL A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT, 97 

XLI FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE, 
97 

XLH A DMLOGUE ON FAKE POETRY, 101 

XLIII ASKING ADVICE, 102 

XLIV SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION, 103 

XLV LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT, 106 

XLVI THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET, 108 

XLVII SEQUELS ARE BARRED, 111 

XLVIII TOM FOOL, 111 

XLIX CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION, 113 

L MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY, 116 

LI THE PIG BABY, 121 

LH APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS, 122 

LIII TIMES AND SEASONS, 124 

LIV TWO HERESIES, 125 

LV THE ART OF EXPRESSION, 126 

LVI GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN, 129 

LVII THE LAYING-ON OF HANDS, 130 

LVIII WAYS AND MEANS, 132 



CONTENTS 

LIX POETRY AS LABOUR, 134 
LX THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE, 134 
LXI IN PROCESSION, 137 

APPENDIX: THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION, 143 



DEFINITIONS 

THERE are two meanings of Poetry as the poet 
himself has come to use the word: — first, 
Poetry, the unforeseen fusion in his mind of 
apparently contradictory emotional ideas; and second, 
Poetry, the more-or-less deliberate attempt, with the 
help of a rhythmic mesmerism, to impose an illusion 
of actual experience on the minds of others. In its 
first and peculiar sense it is the surprise that 
comes after thoughtlessly rubbing a mental Aladdin's 
lamp, and I would suggest that every poem worthy of 
the name has its central idea, its nucleus, formed 
by this spontaneous process; later it becomes the duty 
of the poet as craftsman to present this nucleus in the 
most effective way possible, by practising poetry 
more consciously as an art. He creates in passion, 
then by a reverse process of analyzing, he tests the 
implied suggestions and corrects them on common- 
sense principles so as to make them apply universally. 
Before elaborating the idea of this spontaneous 
Poetry over which the poet has no direct control, it 
would be convenient to show what I mean by the 
Poetry over which he has a certain conscious control, 
by contrasting its method with the method of standard 

[13] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 
Prose. Prose in its most prosy form seems to be the 
art of accurate statement by suppressing as far as 
possible the latent associations of words; for the con- 
venience of his readers the standard prose-writer uses 
an accurate logical phrasing in which perhaps the 
periods and the diction vary with the emotional mood; 
but he only says what he appears at first to say. 
In Poetry the implication is more important than the 
manifest statement; the underlying associations of 
every word are marshalled carefully. Many of the 
best English poets have found great difficulty in 
writing standard prose; this is due I suppose to a sort 
of tender-heartedness, for standard prose-writing 
seems to the poet very much like turning the machine 
guns on an innocent crowd of his own work people. 

Certainly there is a hybrid form, prose poetry, in 
which poets have excelled, a perfectly legitimate 
medium, but one that must be kept distinct from both 
its parent elements. It employs the indirect method 
of poetic suggestion, the flanking movement rather 
than the frontal attack, but like Prose, does not trouble 
to keep rhythmic control over the reader. This 
constant control seems an essential part of Poetry 
proper. But to expect it in prose poetry is to be dis- 
appointed; we may take an analogy from the wilder 
sort of music where if there is continual changing of 
time and key, the listener often does not "catch on" to 
each new idiom, so that he is momentarily confused 
by the changes and the unity of the whole musical 
form is thereby broken for him. So exactly in prose 

[14] 



THE NINE MUSES 
poetry. In poetry proper our delight is in the emo- 
tional variations from a clearly indicated norm of 
rhythm and sound-texture ; but in prose poetry there is 
no recognizable norm. Where in some notable pas- 
sages (of the Authorised Version of the Bible for 
instance) usually called prose poetry, one does find 
complete rhythmic control even though the pattern is 
constantly changing, this is no longer prose poetry, it 
is poetry, not at all the worse for its intricate rhyth- 
mic resolutions. Popular confusion as to the various 
properties and qualities of Poetry, prose poetry, 
verse, prose, with their subcategories of good, bad 
and imitation, has probably been caused by the 
inequality of the writing in works popularly regarded 
as Classics, and made taboo for criticism. There are 
few "masterpieces of poetry" that do not occasionally 
sink to verse, many disregarded passages of Prose 
that are often prose poetry and sometimes even poetry 
itself. 

II 

THE NINE MUSES 

I SUPPOSE that when old ladies remark with a 
breathless wonder "My dear, he has more than 
mere talent, I am convinced he has a touch of 
genius'^ they are differentiating between the two parts 
of poetry given at the beginning of the last section, 
between the man who shows a remarkable aptitude 

[15] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

for conjuring and the man actually also in league with 
the powers of magic. The weakness of originally 
unspontaneous poetry seems to be that the poet has 
only the very small conscious part of his experience 
to draw upon, and therefore in co-ordinating the 
central images, his range of selection is narrower and 
the links are only on the surface. On the other hand, 
spontaneous poetry! untested by conscious analysis has 
the opposite weakness of being liable to surface faults 
and unintelligible thought-connections. Poetry com- 
posed in sleep is a good instance of the sort I mean. 
The rhymes are generally inaccurate, the texture 
clumsy, there is a tendency to use the same words 
close together in different senses, and the thought-con- 
nections are so free as to puzzle the author himself 
when he wakes. A scrap of dream poetry sticks in 
my mind since my early schooldays : 

"It's Henry the VIII! 
It's Henry the VIII! 
I know him by the smile on his face 
He is leading his armies over to France. 

Here eighth and faee seemed perfect rhymes, to the 
sleeping ear, the spirit was magnificent, the impli- 
cations astonishing; but the waking poet was forced 
to laugh. I believe that in the first draft of 
Coleridge's Kuhla Khan, Abora was the rhyme for 
Dulcimer, as: — 

"A damsel with a dulcimer 
Singing of Momit Abora" 

[16] 



THE NINE MUSES 

because "saw" seems too self-conscious an assonance 
and too far removed from "Abora" to impress us as 
having been part of the original dream poem. 
"Could I revive within me" again is surely written in 
a waking mood, probably after the disastrous visit of 
the man from Porlock. 

Henceforward, in using the word Poetry I mean 
both the controlled and uncontrollable parts of 
the art taken together, because each is helpless without 
the other. And I do not wish to limit Poetry, as there 
is a new tendency to do, merely to the short dramatic 
poem, the ballad and the lyric, though it certainly is a 
convenience not to take these as the normal manifes- 
tations of Poetry in order to see more clearly the 
inter-relation of such different forms as the Drama, 
the Epic, and the song with music. In the 
Drama, the emotional conflict which is the whole 
cause and meaning of Poetry is concentrated 
in the mental problems of the leading character 
or characters. They have to choose for instance 
between doing what they think is right and 
the suff'ering or contempt which is the penalty, 
between the gratification of love and the fear of 
hurting the person they love, or similar dilemmas. 
The lesser actors in the drama do not themselves 
necessarily speak the language of poetry or have any 
question in their minds as to the course they should 
pursue; still, by throwing their weight into one scale 
or another they aff'ect the actions of the principals 
and so contribute to the poetry of the play. It is only 

[17] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

the master dramatist who ever attempts to develop 
subsidiary characters in sympathy with the principals. 

The true Epic appears to me as an organic growth 
of dramatic scenes, presented in verse which only 
becomes true poetry on occasion; but these scenes are 
so placed in conflicting relation that between them 
they compose a central theme of Poetry not to be 
found in the detachable parts, and this theme is a 
study of the interactions of the ethical principles of 
opposing tribes or groups. In the Iliad, for instance, 
the conflict is not only between the Trojan and Greek 
ideas, but between groups in each camp. In the 
Odyssey it is between the ethics of sea-wandering and 
the ethics of the dwellers on dry land. I would be in- 
clined to deny the Beowulf as an epic, describing it 
instead as a personal allegory in epical surroundings. 
The Canterbury Tales are much nearer to an English 
Epic, the interacting principles being an imported 
Eastern religion disguised in Southern dress and a 
ruder, more vigorous Northern spirit unsubdued even 
when on pilgrimage. 

The words of a song do not necessarily show in 
themselves the emotional conflict which I regard as 
essential for poetry, but that is because the song is 
definitely a compound of words and music, and the 
poetry lies in this relation. Words for another man's 
music can hardly have a very lively independent ex- 
istence, yet with music they must combine to a power- 
ful chemical action; to write a lyric to conflict with 
imaginary music is the most exacting art imaginable, 

[18] 



POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC 

and is rather like trying to solve an equation in x, y 
and z, given only x. 

I wonder if there are as many genuine Muses as the 
traditional nine; I cannot help thinking that one or 
two of them have been counted twice over. But the 
point of this section is to show the strong family like- 
ness between three or four of them at least. 

Ill 

POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC 

ONE may think of Poetry as being like 
Religion, a modified descendant of primitive 
Magic; it keeps the family characteristic of 
stirring wonder by creating from unpromising lifeless 
materials an illusion of unexpected passionate life. 
The poet, a highly developed witch doctor, does not 
specialize in calling up at set times some one 
particular minor divinity, that of Fear or Lust, of 
War or Family Affection ; he plays on all the emotions 
and serves as comprehensive and universal a God as 
he can conceive. There is evidence for explaining the 
origin of poetry as I have defined it, thus: — 
Primitive man was much troubled by the phenomenon 
of dreams, and early discovered what scientists are 
only just beginning to acknowledge, that the recol- 
lection of dreams is of great use in solving problems 
of uncertainty; there is always a secondary meaning 
behind our most fantastic nightmares. Members of 

[19] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

a primitive society would solemnly recount their 
dreams to the wise ones of the clan and ask them to 
draw an inference. Soon it happened that, in cases 
of doubt, where the dream was forgotten and could 
not be recalled, or where it was felt that a dream was 
needed to confirm or reverse a decision, the peculiarly 
gifted witch doctor or priestess would induce a sort 
of self -hypnotism, and in the light of the dream so 
dreamed, utter an oracle which contained an answer 
to the problem proposed. The compelling use of 
rhythm to hold people's attention and to make them 
beat their feet in time, was known, and the witch 
doctor seems to have combined the rhythmic beat of a 
drum or gong with the recital of his dream. In these 
rhythmic dream utterances, intoxicating a primitive 
community to sympathetic emotional action for a par- 
ticular purpose of which I will treat later. Poetry, in 
my opinion, originated, and the dream symbolism of 
Poetry was further encouraged by the restrictions of 
the taboo, which made definite reference to certain 
people, gods and objects, unlucky. 

This is not to say that verse-recital of laws or 
adventures or history did not possibly come before 
oracular poetry, and whoever it was who found it 
convenient that his word stresses should correspond 
with beat of drum or stamp of feet, thereby originated 
the rhythm that is common both toi verse and to poetry. 
Verse is not necessarily degenerate poetry; rhymed 
advertisement and the memoria technica have kept up 
the honest tradition of many centuries; witty verse 

[20] 



POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC 

with no poetical pretensions justifies its existence a 
hundred times over; even the Limerick can become 
delightful in naughty hands ; but where poetry differs 
from other verse is by being essentially a solution to 
some pressing emotional problem and has always the 
oracular note. 

Between verse, bad poetry and fake poetry, there 
is a great distinction. Bad poetry is simply the work 
of a man who solves his emotional problems to his 
own satisfaction but not to anybody else's. Fake 
poetry, the decay of poetry, corresponds exactly with 
fake magic, the decay of true magic. It happens 
that some member of the priestly caste, finding it im- 
possible to go into a trance when required, even with 
the aid of intoxicants, has to resort to subterfuge. 
He imitates a state of trance, recalls some one else's 
dream which he alters slightly, and wraps his oracu- 
lar answer in words recollected from the lips of gen- 
uine witch doctors. He takes care to put his implied 
meaning well to the fore and the applicants give him 
payment and go away as well pleased with their 
money's worth as the readers of Tupper, Montgomery 
and Wilcox' with the comfortable verses supplied them 
under the trade name of "Poetry." 

Acrostics and other verses of wit have, I believe, 
much the same ancestry in the ingenious double 
entendres with which the harassed priestesses of 
Delphi insured against a wrong guess. 



[21] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

IV 

CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS 

THE suggestion that an emotional conflict is 
necessary for the birth of true poetry will 
perhaps not be accepted without illustrative 
instances. But one need only take any of the most 
famous lines from Elizabethan drama, those generally 
acknowledged as being the most essential poetry, and 
a battle of the great emotions, faith, hope or love 
against fear, grief or hate, will certainly appear; 
though one side may indeed be fighting a hopeless 
battle. 

When Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is waiting for the 
clock to strike tvv^elve and the Devil to exact his debt, 
he cries out: 

That Time may cease and midnight never come 
O lente, lente currite noctis equi. 

Scholastic commentators have actually been found to 
wonder at the "inappropriateness" of "Go slowly, 
slowly, coursers of the night," a quotation originally 
spoken by an Ovidian lover with his arms around the 
mistress from whom he must part at dawn. They do 
not even note it as marking the distance the scholar 
Faustus has travelled since his first dry-boned Latin 
quotation Bene disserere est finis logices which he 
pedantically translates : 

[22] 



CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS 

Is, to dispute well, Logicke's chiefest end. 

Far less do they see how Marlowe has made the lust 
of life, in its hopeless struggle against the devils com- 
ing to bind it for the eternal bonfire, tragically unable 
to find any better expression than this feeble over- 
sweetness; so that there follows with even greater in- 
sistence of fate: — 

The starres moove stil, time runs, the clocke wil strike, 
The divel wil come and Faustus must be damnd. 

When Lady Macbeth, sleep-walking, complains that 
"all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little 
hand," these perfumes are not merely typically sweet 
smells to drown the reek of blood. They represent 
also her ambitions for the luxury of a Queen, and the 
conflict of luxurious ambition against fate and dam- 
nation is as one-sided as before. Or take Webster's 
most famous line in his Duchess of Malfi: 

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young, 

spoken by Ferdinand over the Duchess' body; and 
that word "dazzle" does duty for two emotions at 
once, sun-dazzled awe at loveliness, tear-dazzled grief 
for early death. 

The eff*ect of these distractions of mind is so often 
an appeal to our pity, even for the murderers or for 
the man who has had his fill of "vaine pleasure for 
24 yeares" that to rouse this pity has been taken, 

[23] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

wrongly, I think, as the chief end of poetry. Poetry 
is not always tragedy; and there is no pity stirred by 
Captain Tobias Hume's love song "Faine would I 
change this note, To which false love has charmed 
me," or in Andrew Marvell's Mower's address to the 
glow-worms : 

Ye country comets that portend 

No war nor prince's funeral, 
Shining unto no higher end 

Than to presage the grass's fall. 

There is no pity either for Hume's lover who suddenly 
discovers that he has been making a sad song about 
nothing, or for Marvell's glow-worms and their rustic- 
ity and slightness of aim. In the first case Love 
stands up in its glory against the feeble whining of 
minor poets ; in the second, thought's of terror and ma- 
jesty, the heavens themselves blazing forth the death 
of princes, conflict ineff'ectually with security and 
peace, the evening glow-worm prophesying fair 
weather for mowing next morning, and meanwhile 
lighting rustic lovers to their tryst. 

V 

THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH 

THE power of surprise which marks all true 
poetry, seems to result from a foreknowledge 
of certain unwitting processes of the reader's 
mind, for which the poet more or less deliberately 

[24] 



THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH 

provides. The underlying associations of each word 
in a poem form close combinations of emotion unex- 
pressed by the bare verbal pattern. 

In this way the poet may be compared with a 
father piecing together a picture-block puzzle for his 
children. He surprises them at last by turning over 
the completed picture, and showing them that by the 
act of assembling the scattered parts of "Red Riding 
Hood with the Basket of Food" he has all the while 
been building up unnoticed underneath another scene 
of the tragedy — "The Wolf eating the Grandmother." 

The analogy can be more closely pressed ; careless 
arrangement of the less important pieces or wilfully 
decorative borrowing from another picture altogether 
may look very well in the upper scene, but what con- 
fusion below! 

The possibilities of this pattern underneath have 
been recognized and exploited for centuries in Far 
Eastern systems of poetry. I once even heard an 
English Orientalist declare that Chinese was the only 
language in which true poetry could be written, be- 
cause of the undercurrents of allusion contained in 
every word of the Chinese language. It never 
occurred to him that the same thing might be 
unrecognizedly true also of English words. 



[25] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

VI 

"INSPIRATION" 

PEOPLE are always enquiring how exactly 
poets get their "inspiration," perhaps in the 
hope that it may happen to themselves one 
day and that if they know the signs in advance, some- 
thing profitable may come of it. 

It is a difficult conundrum, but I should answer 
somehow like this:* — ^The poet is consciously or 
unconsciously always either taking in or giving out; 
he hears, observes, weighs, guesses, condenses, 
idealizes, and the new ideas troop quietly into his 
mind until suddenly every now and again two of 
them violently quarrel and drag into the fight a group 
of other ideas that have been loitering about at the 
back of his mind for years; there is great excitement, 
noise and bloodshed, with finally a reconciliation and 
drinks all round. The poet writes a tactful police 
report on the affair and there is the poem. 

Or, to put it in a more sober form : — 

When conflicting issues disturb his mind, which in 
its conscious state is unable to reconcile them logi- 
cally, the poet acquires the habit of self -hypnotism, 
as practised by the witch doctors, his ancestors in 
poetry. 

He learns in self-protection to take pen and paper 
and let the pen solve the hitherto insoluble problem 
which has caused the disturbance. 

[26] 



MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR 

I speak of this process of composition as self- 
hypnotism because on being interrupted the poet ex- 
periences the disagreeable sensations of a sleep- 
walker disturbed, and later finds it impossible to 
remember how the early drafts of a poem ran, though 
he may recall every word of a version which finally 
satisfied his conscious scrutiny. Confronted after- 
wards with the very first draft of the series he cannot 
in many cases decipher his own writing, far less re- 
collect the process of thought which made him erase 
this word and substitute that. Many poets of my ac- 
quaintance have corroborated what I have just said 
and also observed that on laying down their pens after 
the first excitement of composition they feel the same 
sort of surprise that a man finds on waking from a 
"fugue," they discover that they have done a piece of 
work of which they never suspected they were ca- 
pable; but at the same moment they discover a 
number of trifling surface defects which were in- 
visible before. 



VII 

THE PARABLE OF MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR 

MR. POETA was a child of impulse, and 
though not really a very careful student of 
Chaucer himself, was incensed one day at 
reading a literary article by an old schoolfellow 
called Lector, patronizing the poet in an impudent 

[27] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

way and showing at the same time a great ignorance 
of his best work. But instead of taking the more 
direct and prosaic course of writing a letter of protest 
to the review which printed the article, or of 
directly giving the author a piece of his mind, he im- 
provised a complicated plot for the young man's cor- 
rection. 

On the following day he invited Mr. Lector to 
supper at his home and spent a busy morning making 
preparations. He draped the dining-room walls with 
crape, took up the carpet, and removed all the 
furniture except the table and two massive chairs 
which were finally drawn up to a meal of bread, 
cheese and water. When supper-time arrived and 
with it Mr. Lector, Mr. Poeta was discovered sitting 
in deep dejection in a window seat with his face 
buried in his hands; he would not notice his guest's 
arrival for a full minute. Mr. Lector, embarrassed 
by the strangeness of his reception (for getting no 
answer to his knock at the door he had forced his way 
in), was now definitely alarmed by Mr. Poeta's 
nervous gestures, desultory conversation and his 
staring eyes perpetually turning to a great rusty 
scimitar hanging on a nail above the mantelpiece. 
There was no attendance, nor any knife or plate on the 
board. The bread was stale, the cheese hard, and no 
sooner had Mr. Lector raised a glass of water to his 
lips than his host dashed it from his hands and with 
a bellow of rage sprang across the table. Mr. Lector, 
saw him seize the scimitar and flourish it around his 

[28] 



MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR 

head, so for want of any weapon of defence, the 
unfortunate young man reacted to terror-stricken 
flight. He darted from the room and heard the 
blade whistle through the air behind him. 

Out of an open window he jumped and into a small 
enclosed yard ; with the help of a handy rainwater tub 
he climbed the opposite wall, then dashed down a 
pathway through a shrubbery and finding the front 
door of a deserted cottage standing open, rushed in 
and upstairs, then breathlessly flinging into an empty 
room at the stairhead, slammed the door. 

By so slamming the door he had locked it and on 
recovering his presence of mind found himself a close 
prisoner, for the only window was stoutly barred and 
the door lock was too massive to break. Here then, 
he stayed in confinement for three days, suff*ering 
severely until released by an accomplice of Mr. Poeta, 
who aff"ected to be much surprised at finding him there 
and even threatened an action for trespass. But cold, 
hungry and thirsty, Mr. Lector had still had for 
companion in his misery a coverless copy of Chaucer 
which he found lying in the grate and which he read 
through from beginning to end with great enjoyment, 
thereupon reconsidering his previous estimate of the 
poet's greatness. 

But he never realized that every step he had taken 
had been predetermined by the supposed maniac and 
that once frightened off" his balance, he had reacted 
according to plan. Mr. Poeta did not need to pursue 
him over the wall or even to go any further than the 

[29] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

dining-room door; he counted on the all-or-none 
principle of reaction to danger finishing the job for 
him. So out at the window went Mr. Lector and 
every recourse offered for escape he accepted iin- 
questioningly. Mr. Poeta knew well enough that 
Mr. Lector would eventually treasure that copy of 
Chaucer prepared for him, as a souvenir of his 
terrible experience, that he would have it rebound 
and adopt the poet as a "discovery" of his own. 

The reader in interpreting this parable, must not 
make too close a comparison of motives; the process 
is all that is intended to show. The poet, once 
emotion has suggested a scheme of work, goes over 
the ground with minute care and makes everything 
sure, so that when his poem is presented to the reader, 
the latter is thrown oif his balance temporarily by the 
novelty of the ideas involved. He has no critical 
weapons at his command, so he must follow the course 
wjiich the poet has mapped out for him. He is 
carried away in spite of himself and though the actual 
words do not in themselves express all the meaning 
which the poet manages to convey (Mr. Poeta, as has 
been said, did not pursue) yet the reader on recover- 
ing from the first excitement finds the implied con- 
clusion laid for him to discover, and flattering himself 
that he has reached it independently, finally carries 
it off* as his own. Even where a conclusion is 
definitely expressed in a poem the reader often 
deceives himself into saying, "I have often thought 
that before, but never so clearly," when as a matter of 

[30] 



THE CARPENTER'S SON 
fact he has just been unconsciously translating the 
poet's experience into terms of his own, and finding 
the formulated conclusion sound, imagines that the 
thought is originally his. 

VIII 
THE CARPENTER'S SON 

FABLES and analogies serve very well in- 
stead of the psychological jargon that 
would otherwise have to be used in a dis- 
cussion of the poet's mental clockwork, but they must 
be supported wherever possible by definite instances, 
chapter and verse. An example is therefore owed 
of how easily and completely the poet can 
deceive his readers once he has assumed control of 
their imagination, hypnotizing them into a receptive 
state by indirect sensuous suggestions and by subtle 
variations of verse-melody; which hypnotism, by the 
way, I regard as having a physical rather than a 
mental effect and being identical with the rhythmic 
hypnotism to which such animals as snakes, elephants 
or apes are easily subject. 

Turn then to Mr. Housman's classic sequence "A 
Shropshire Lad," to No. XLVII "The Carpenter's 
Son," beginning, "Here the hangman stops his cart." 
Ask any Housman enthusiasts (they are happily 
many) how long it took them to realize what the poet 
is forcing on them there. In nine cases out of ten 

[31] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

where this test is applied, it will be found that the 
lyric has never been consciously recognized as an 
Apocryphal account of the Crucifixion ; and even those 
who have consciously recognized the clues offered 
have failed to formulate consciously the further 
daring (some would say blasphemous) implica- 
tions of its position after the last three pieces "Shot, 
lad? So quick, so clean an ending," "If it chance 
your eye offend you" and the momentary relief of 
"Bring in this timeless grave to throw." 

Among Jubilee bonfires; village sports of running, 
cricket, football; a rustic murder; the London and 
North Western Railway; the Shropshire Light In- 
fantry; ploughs; lovers on stiles or in long grass; the 
ringing of church bells ; and then this suicide by shoot- 
ing, no reader is prepared for the appearance of the 
historic Son of Sorrow. The poet has only to call 
the Cross a gallows-tree and make the Crucified call 
His disciples "Lads" instead of "My Brethren" or 
"Children," and we are completely deceived. 

In our almost certain failure to recognize Him in 
this context lies, I believe, the intended irony of the 
poem which is strewn with the plainest scriptural 
allusions. 

In justification of the above and of my deductions 
about "La Belle Dame sans Merci" in a later section 
I plead the rule that "Poetry contains nothing hap- 
hazard," which follows naturally on the theory con- 
necting poetry with dreams. By this rule I mean 
that if a poem, poem-sequence or drama is an alle- 

[32] 



THE GADDING VINE 
gory of genuine emotional experience and not a mere 
cold-blooded exercise, no striking detail and no jux- 
taposition of apparently irrelevant themes which it 
contains can be denied at any rate a personal signifi- 
cance — a cypher that can usually be decoded from 
another context. 

IX 

THE GADDING VINE 



WHEN we say that a poet is born not made, 
it is saying something much more that 
Poetry is essentially spontaneous in ori- 
gin, and that very little of it can therefore be taught 
on a blackboard ; it means that a man is not a poet un- 
less there is some peculiar event in his family history 
to account for him. It means to me that with the ap- 
parent exceptions given in the next section, the poet, 
like his poetry, is himself the result of the fusion of 
incongruous forces. Marriages between people of 
conflicting philosophies of life, widely separated 
nationalities or (most important) different emotional 
processes, are likely either to result in children hope- 
lessly struggling with inhibitions or to develop in 
them a central authority of great resource and most 
quick witted at compromise. Early influences, other 
than parental, stimulate the same process. The 
mind of a poet is like an international conference 

[33] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

composed of delegates of both sexes and every shade 
of political thought, which is trying to decide on a 
series of problems of which the chairman has him- 
self little previous knowledge — ^yet this chairman, 
this central authority, will somehow contrive to sign a 
report embodying the specialized knowledge and 
reconciling the apparently hopeless disagreements of 
all factions concerned. These factions can be 
called, for convenience, the poet's sub-personalities. 

It is obviously impossible to analyze with accuracy 
the various elements that once combined to make a 
phrase in the mind of a poet long dead, but for the 
sake of illustration here is a fanciful reconstruction 
of the clash of ideas that gave us Milton's often quoted 
"Gadding Vine." The words, to me, represent an 
encounter between the poet's sub-personalities "B" 
and "C." Says "B":— 

"What a gentle placid fruitful plant the vine is; I 
am thinking of putting it in one of my speeches as 
emblem of the kindly weakness of the Vegetables." 

C replies very tartly: — 

"Gentle placid fruitful fiddle-sticks! Why, my 
good friend, think of the colossal explosive force re- 
quired to thrust up that vast structure from a tiny 
seed buried inches deep in the earth; against the force 
of gravity too, and against very heavy winds. Placid- 
ity! Look at its leaves tossing about and its greedy 
tendrils swaying in search of something to attack. 
Vegetable indeed! It's mobile, it's vicious, it's more 

[34] 



THE GADDING VINE 

like a swarm of gad-flies." B continues obstinate, 
saying "I never heard such nonsense. A vine is still 
a vine, in spite of your paradoxes." 

"Anyhow, the juice of the vine makes you gad 
about pretty lively, sometimes," says C. 

"Grapes are the conventional fruit for the sick- 
room," retorts B. 

"Well, what did the Greeks think about it?" pur- 
sues C. "Wasn't Dionysos the god of the Vine? He 
didn't stop rooted all his life in some miserable little 
Greek valley. He went gadding off to India and 
brought back tigers." 

"If you are going to appeal to the poets," returns 
B, "you can't disregard the position of the vine in 
decorative art. It has been conventionalized into the 
most static design you can find, after the lotus. When 
I say Vine, that's quite enough for me, just V for 
vegetable." 

They are interrupted by A the master spirit who 
says with authority: — 

"Silence, the two of you! I rule a compromise. 
Gall it a "gadding vine" and have done with it." 



The converse of the proposition stated at the begin- 
ning of this section, namely that every one who has 
the sort of family history mentioned above and is not 
the prey of inhibitions, will become a poet, is cer- 
tainly not intended. Poetry is only one outlet for 
peculiar individual expression; there are also the 

[35] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

other arts, with politics, generalship, philosophy, and 
imaginative business; or merely rhetoric, fantastic 
jokes and original swearing — 

X 

THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM 

THE question of why Poets suddenly seem to 
come to a dead end and stop writing true 
Poetry, is one that has always perplexed lit- 
erary critics, and the poets themselves still more. 
The explanation will probably be found in two causes. 

In the first case the poet's preoccupation with the 
clash of his emotions has been transmuted into a 
calmer state of meditation on philosophic paradox: 
but poetry being, by accepted definition, sensuous and 
passionate is no vehicle of expression for this state. 
Impersonal concepts can perhaps be expressed in in- 
tellectual music, but in poetry the musical rhythm 
and word-texture are linked with a sensuous imagery 
too gross for the plane of philosophic thought. Thus 
dithyramb, by which I mean the essentially musical 
treatment of poetry in defiance of the sense of the 
words used, is hardly a more satisfactory medium 
than metaphysical verse: in which even a lyrical 
sugar-coating to the pill cannot induce the childish 
mood of poetry to accept philosophic statements re- 
moved beyond the plane of pictorial allegory. 

In the second case the conflict of the poet's sub- 
[36] 



DEAD END AND MAN OF ONE POEM 

personalities has been finally settled, by some satis- 
faction of desire or removal of a cause of fear, in the 
complete rout of the opposing parties, and the victors 
dictate their own laws, uncontradicted, in legal prose 
or (from habit) in verse. 

Distinction ought to be drawn between the poet and 
the man who has written poetry. There are certainly 
men of only one poem, a James Clarence Mangan, a 
Christopher Smart, a Julian Grenfell (these are in- 
stances more convenient than accurate) who may be 
explained either as born poets, tortured with a life- 
long mental conflict, though able perhaps only once 
in their life to "go under" to their own self -hypnotism, 
or as not naturally poets at all but men who write to 
express a sudden intolerable clamour in their brain; 
this is when circumstances have momentarily alien- 
ated the usually happy members of their mental 
family, but once the expression has brought reconcilia- 
tion, there is no further need of poetry, and the poet 
born out of due time, ceases to be. 

This temporary writing of poetry by normal single- 
track minds is most common in youth when the sud- 
den realization of sex, its powers and its limited op- 
portunities for satisfactory expression, turns the world 
upside down for any sensitive boy or girl. Wartime 
has the same sort of effect. I have definite evidence 
for saying that much of the trench-poetry written 
during the late war was the work of men not other- 
wise poetically inclined, and that it was very fre- 
quently due to an insupportable conflict between 

[37] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

suppressed instincts of love and fear; the officer's 
actual love which he could never openly show, for the 
boys he commanded, and the fear, also hidden under 
a forced gaiety, of the horrible death that threatened 
them all. 

XI 

SPENSER'S CUFFS 

THE poet's quarrelsome lesser personalities 
to which I have referred are divided into 
camps by the distinction of sex. But in a 
poet the dominant spirit is male and though usually a 
feminist in sympathy, cannot afford to favour the 
women at the expense of his own sex. This amplifies 
my distrust of poets with floppy hats, long hair, ex- 
travagant clothes and inverted tendencies. Apollo 
never to my knowledge appears in Greek art as a 
Hermaphrodite, and the Greeks understood such 
problems far better than we do. I know it is usual to 
defend these extravagances of dress by glorifying the 
Elizabethan age; but let it be remembered that 
Edmund Spenser himself wore "short hair, little 
bands and little cuffs." 

If there is no definite sexual inversion to account 
for breaking out in fancy dress, a poet who is any 
good at all ought not to feel the need of advertising 
his profession in this way. As I understand the 
poet's nature, though he tries to dress as convention- 
ally as possible, he will always prove too strong for 

[38] 



SPENSER'S CUFFS 
his clothes and look completely ridiculous or very 
magnificent according to the occasion. 

This matter of dress may seem unimportant, but 
people are still so shy of acknowledging the poet in 
his lifetime as a gifted human being who may have 
something important to say, that any dressing up or 
unnecessary strutting does a great deal of harm. 

I am convinced that this extravagant dressing up 
tendency, like the allied tendency to unkemptness, is 
only another of the many forms in which the capri- 
cious child spirit which rules our most emotional 
dreams is trying also to dominate the critical, diligent, 
constructive man-spirit of waking life, without which 
the poet is lost beyond recovery. Shelley was a 
great poet not because he enjoyed sailing paper boats 
on the Serpentine but because, in spite of this infan- 
tile preference he had schooled his mind to hard think- 
ing on the philosophical and political questions of 
the day and had made friends among men of intellect 
and sophistication. 

It is from considerations rather similar to these that 
I have given this book a plain heading and restrained 
my fancy from elaborating a gay seventeenth-cen- 
tury title or sub-title: — "A Broad-side from Par- 
nassus," "The Mustard Tart," "Pebbles to Crack 
Your Teeth," or "Have at you. Professor Gargoyle!" 
But I am afraid that extravagance has broken down 
my determination to write soberly, on almost every 
page. And ... no, the question of the psychology 
of poetesses is too big for these covers and too thorny 

[39] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

in argument. When psycho-analysis has provided 
more evidence on the difference between the 
symbolism of women's dreams and men's, there will 
be something to say worth saying. Meanwhile it can 
only be offered as a strong impression that the dreams 
of normally-sexed women are, by comparison with 
those of normally-sexed men, almost always of the 
same simple and self-centred nature as their poetry 
and their humour. 

XII 
CONNECTION OF POETRY AND HUMOUR 

IT was no accident that gave Chaucer, Shakespeare 
and Keats a very sly sense of humour, because 
humour is surely only another product of the 
same process that makes poetry and poets — the 
reconciliation of incongruities. 

When, for instance, Chaucer says that one of his 
Canterbury characters could trip and dance "after the 
schole of Oxenforde" he is saying two things: — 

I. That Absalom thought he could dance well. 

II. That the professors of the University of Oxford 
are hardly the people from whom one would 
expect the most likely instruction in that art, 

and to point the joke he adds to "trip and dance" the 
absurd "and with his legges casten to and fro." A 
sympathetic grin, as poets and other conjurors know, 
is the best possible bridge for a successful illusion. 

[40] 



DICTION 

Coleridge was the first writer, so far as I know, to see 
the connection between poetry and humour, but his 
argument which uses the Irish Bull "I was a fine child 
but they changed me" to prove the analogy, trails off 
disappointingly. 

XIII 
DICTION 

IDEALLY speaking, there is no especially poetic 
range of subjects, and no especially poetic 
group of words with which to treat them. 
Indeed, the more traditionally poetical the subject 
and the words, the more difficult it is to do anything 
with them. The nymph, the swain, the faun, and 
the vernal groves are not any more or less legitimate 
themes of poetry than Motor Bicycle Trials, Girl 
Guides, or the Prohibition Question, the only 
difference being a practical one; the second category 
may be found unsuitable for the imaginative 
digestion because these words are still somehow un- 
cooked; in the former case they are unsuitable be- 
cause overcooked, rechauffe, tasteless. The cooking 
process is merely that of constant use. When a word 
or a phrase is universally adopted and can be used 
in conversation without any apologetic accentuation, 
or in a literary review without italics, inverted 
commas or capital letters, then it is ready for use in 
poetry. 

[41] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

As a convenient general rule, Mr. Lascelles 
Abercrombie has pointed out in his admirable 
pamphlet "Poetry and Contemporary Speech," the 
poet will always be best advised to choose as the main 
basis of his diction the ordinary spoken language of 
his day; the reason being that words grow richer by 
daily use and take on subtle associations which the 
artificially bred words of literary or technical appli- 
cation cannot acquire with such readiness; the former 
have therefore greater poetic possibilities in juxta- 
position. 

An objection will be raised to the term "universal" 
as applied to the audience for poetry; it is a limited 
universality when one comes to consider it. Most 
wise poets intend tlieir work only for those who 
speak the same language as themselves, who have a 
"mental age" not below normal, and who, if they 
don't perhaps understand all the allusions in a poem, 
will know at any rate where to go to look them up in 
a work of reference. 

XIV 

THE DAFFODILS 

ART of every sort, according to my previous 
contentions, is an attempt to rationalize 
some emotional conflict in the artist's mind. 
When the painter says "That's really good to paint" 

[42] 



THE DAFFODILS 

and carefully arranges his still life, he has felt a 
sort of antagonism between the separate parts of the 
group and is going to discover by painting on what 
that antagonism is founded, presenting it as clearly 
and simply as he knows how, in the slightly distorting 
haze of the emotion aroused. He never says, "I 
think I'll paint a jug or bottle, next," any more than 
the poet says "I've a free morning on Saturday; I'll 
write an ode to the Moon or something of that sort, 
and get two guineas for it from the London Mercury J^ 
No, a particular jug or bottle may well start a train 
of thought which in time produces a painting, and a 
particular aspect of the moon may fire some emotional 
tinder and suggest a poem. But the Moon is no more 
the subject of the poem than the murder of an 
Archduke was the cause of the late European War. 

Wordsworth's lines "I wandered lonely as a 
cloud" are, as he would have said, about "something 
more" than yellow daffodils at the water's brim. I 
have heard how schoolmasters and mistresses point out 
in the "Poetry Lesson" that the whole importance of 
this poem lies in Wordsworth's simple perception of 
the beauty of Spring flowers; but it seems to me to be 
an important poem only because Wordsworth has 
written spontaneously (though perhaps under his 
sister's influence) and recorded to his own satis- 
faction an emotional state which we all can recognize. 

These daff'odils have interrupted the thoughts of 
an imhappy, lonely man and, reminding him of his 
childhood, become at once emblems of a golden age 

[43] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

of disinterested human companionship; he uses their 
memory later as a charm to banish the spectres of 
trouble and loneliness. I hope I have interpreted the 
poem correctly. Let us now fantastically sup- 
pose for the sake of argument that Wordsworth 
had been intentionally seeking solitude like a hurt 
beast hating his kind, and had suddenly come across 
the same daffodil field: he surely might have been 
struck with a sudden horror for such a huge crowd 
of flower-faces, especially if his early memories of 
flower picking had been blighted by disagreeable 
companionship and the labour of picking for the 
flower market. He would then have written a poem 
of exactly the opposite sense, recording his sudden 
feeling of repulsion at the sight of the flowers and 
remarking at the end that sometimes when he is lying 
on his couch in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash 
across that inward eye which is the curse of solitude, 

"O/i then my heart with horror fills 
And shudders with the daffodils.'' 

For readers to whom he could communicate his 
dislike of daffodils on the basis of a common ex- 
perience of brutal companionship in childhood and 
forced labour, the poem would seem a masterpiece, 
and those of them who were schoolmasters would be 
pretty sure to point out in their Poetry Lessons that 
the importance of the poem lay in Wordsworth's "per- 
ception of the dreadfulness of Spring Flowers." 

Again the scholastic critic finds the chief value of 
[44] 



VERS LIBRE 

Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" in the re- 
ligious argument, and would not be interested to be 
told that the poet is being disturbed by a melancholy 
contradiction between his own happy childhood, ideal- 
istic boyhood and disappointed age. But if he were 
to go into the psychological question and become 
doubtful whether as a matter of fact, children have 
not as many recollections of Hell as of Heaven, 
whether indeed the grown mind does not purposely 
forget early misery and see childhood in a deceptive 
haze of romance; and if he therefore suspected 
Wordsworth of reasoning from a wrong premise he 
would have serious doubts as to whether it was a good 
poem after all. At which conclusion even the most 
pagan and revolutionary of modern bards would raise 
a furious protest; if the poem holds together, if the 
poet has said what he means honestly, convincingly 
and with passion — as Wordsworth did — the glory 
and the beauty of the dream are permanently fixed 
beyond reach of the scientific lecturer's pointer. 

XV 
VERS LIBRE 

THE limitation of Vers Libre, which I regard 
as only our old friend, Prose Poetry, broken 
up in convenient lengths, seems to be that 
the poet has not the continual hold over his reader's 
attention that a regulated (this does not mean alto- 
gether "regular") scheme of verse properly used 

[45] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

would give him. The temporary loss of control must 
be set off against the freedom which vers libre-ists 
claim from irrelevant or stereotyped images suggested 
by the necessity of rhyme or a difficult metre. 

This is not to say that a poet shouldn't start his race 
from what appears to hardened traditionalists as about 
ten yards behind scratch; indeed, if he feels that this 
is the natural place for him, he would be unwise to do 
otherwise. But my contention is that vers libre has a 
serious limitation which regulated verse has not. In 
vers libre there is no natural indication as to how 
the lines are to be stressed. There are thousands of 
lines of Walt Whitman's, over the pointing of which, 
and the intended cadence, elocutionists would dis- 
agree; and this seems to be leaving too much to 
chance. 

I met in a modern vers libre poem the line spoken 
by a fallen angel, "I am outcast of Paradise"; but 
how was I to say it? What clue had I to the intended 
rhythm, in a poem without any guiding signs? In 
regulated verse the reader is compelled to accentuate 
as the poet determines. Here is the same line intro- 
duced into three nonsensical examples of rhyming: — 

Satan to the garden came 

And found his Lordship walking lame, 

"Give me manna, figs and spice, 

I am outcast of Paradise." 

or quite differently: — 

"Beryls and porphyries, 
Pomegranate j uice ! 

[46] 



VERS LIBRE 

I am outcast of Paradise 
(What was the use?) 

or one can even make the reader accept a third 
alternative, impressively dragging at the last 
important word: — 

He came to his Lordship then 

For manna, figs and spice, 
"I am chief of the Fallen Ten, 

I am outcast of Paradise." 

The regulating poet must of course make sure at the 
beginning of the poem that there is no possible wrong 
turning for the reader to take. Recently, and since 
writing the above, an elder poet, who asks to remain 
anonymous, has given me an amusing account of 
how he mis-read Swinburne's "Hertha," the opening 
lines of which are : — 

I am that which began; 

Out of me the years roll; 
Out of me, God and man; 

I am equal and whole; 
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily. I 
am the soul. 

My informant read the short lines as having four beats 

each:< — 

r am that || which began; 

Out of me II the years roll; 
Oiit of me 1 1 God and man ; 
r am equal || and whole 
[47] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

and thought this very noble and imposing, though the 
''6qual and whole" was perhaps a trifle forced. The 
next stanza told him that something was amiss and he 
discovered that it was only a two-beat line after all. 
"It was Swinburne's impudence in putting the 
Almighty's name in an unaccented place of the line, 
and accenting the name of Man, that put me on the 
wrong track," he said. Swinburne's fault here, for 
such as agree with the accusation, was surely in his 
wrong sense of material; he was making muslin do 
the work of camel's hair cloth. He was imposing 
a metre on his emotions, whereas the emotions should 
determine the metre — and even then constantly 
modify it. Apropos of the vers Ubre-ists, my friend 
also denied that there was such a thing as vers libre 
possible, arguing beyond refutation that if it was 
vers it couldn't be truly libre and if it was truly libre 
it couldn't possibly come under the category of vers. 
Perhaps the most damaging criticism (if true) of 
the vers libre school of today is that the standard 
which most of its professors set themselves is not a 
very high one; with rhythmic freedom so dearly 
bought, one expects a more intricate system of inter- 
lacing implications than in closer bound poetry. 
Natural rhythms need no hunting; there is some sort 
of rhythm in every phrase you write, if you break it 
up small enough and make sufficient allowances for 
metric resolutions. There is often a queer, wayward 
broken-kneed rhythm running through whole sentences 
of standard prose. The following news item has not 

[48] 



VERS LIBRE 

had a word changed since I found it in The Daily 
Mirror. 

John Frain 
Of Ballyghadereen 
Was indicted at Roscommon for the murder of his 

father; 
He battered his father, an old man, to death with a 

pounder; 
The jury found him unable to plead 
And he was committed 
To an as'ylum. 

One doesn't "listen" when reading prose, but in poetry 
or anything offered under that heading a submerged 
metre is definitely expected. Very few readers of 
Mr. Kipling's "Old Man Kangaroo" which is printed 
as prose, realize that it is written in strict verse all 
through and that he is, as it were, pulling a long nose 
at us. The canny vers librist gets help from his 
printer to call your attention to what he calls 
"cadence" and "rhythmic relations" (not easy to 
follow) which might have escaped you if printed as 
prose; this sentence, you'll find, has its thumb to its 
nose. 



[49] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

XVI 
MOVING MOUNTAINS 

PERHAPS some people who buy this book 
will be disappointed at not being told the 
correct way of writing triolets and rondeaux. 
Theirs is the same practical type of mind that longs 
to join a Correspondence School of Art and learn the 
formulas for drawing a washer-woman or trousers 
or the stock caricature of Mr. Winston Churchill. 

But poetry is not a science, it is an act of faith; 
mountains are often moved by it in the most unex- 
pected directions against all the rules laid down by 
professors of dynamics — only for short distances, I 
admit; still, definitely moved. The only possible 
test for the legitimacy of this or that method of 
poetry is the practical one, the question, "Did the 
moxmtain stir?" 

XVII 
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI 

THE psalmist explains an outburst of 
sorrowful poetry as due to a long suppres- 
sion of the causes of his grief. He says, 
"I kept silent, yea, even from good words. My 
heart was hot within me and while I was thus musing, 

[50] 



LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI 
the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my 
tongue." So it was I believe with Keats in the com- 
position of this compellingly sorrowful ballad. Sir 
S. Colvin's "Life of Keats" gives the setting well 
enough. We do not know exactly what kindled the 
fire but I am inclined to think with Sir S. Colvin, 
that Keats had been reading a translation ascribed to 
Chaucer from Alan Chartier's French poem of the 
same title. The poet says: — 

"I came unto a lustie greene vallay 
Full of floures. . . 

. . . riding an easy paas 
I fell in thought of joy full desperate 
With great disease and paine, so that I was 
Of all lovers the most unfortunate. . ." 

Death has separated him from the mistress he 
loved. . . . We know that Keats' heart had been 
hot within for a long while, and the suppressed 
emotional conflict that made him keep silent and 
muse is all too plain. He has a growing passion for 
the "beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable 
and strange . . . MINX" Fanny Brawne; she it was 
who had doubtless been looking on him "as she did 
love" and "sighing full sore," and this passion comes 
into conflict with the apprehension, not yet a 
certainty, of his own destined death from con- 
sumption, so that the Merciless Lady, to put it baldly, 
represents both the woman he loved and the death he 
feared, the woman whom he wanted to glorify by his 

[51] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

poetry and the death that would cut his poetry short. 
Of shutting "her wild, wild eyes with kisses four" 
which makes the almost intolerable climax to the 
ballad, he writes in a journal-letter to his brother 
George in America, with a triviality and a light- 
heartedness that can carry no possible conviction. 
He is concealing the serious conditions of body and of 
heart which have combined to bring a "loitering indo- 
lence" on his writing, now his livelihood; he does not 
want George to read between the lines; at the same 
time it is a relief even to copy out the poem. George 
knows little of Fanny beyond the purposely unpre- 
possessing portraits of her that John himself has 
given, but the memory of their beloved brother Tom's 
death from consumption is fresh in the minds of both. 
George had sailed to America not realizing how ill 
Tom had been, John had come back tired out from 
Scotland, to find him dying; he had seen the lily on 
Tom's brow, the hectic rose on his cheek, his starved 
lips in horrid warning gaping, and, as the final 
horrible duty, had shut his brother's wild staring 
eyes with coins, not kisses. Now Fanny's mocking 
smile and sidelong glance play hide and seek in his 
mind with Tom's dreadful death-mask. It was 
about this time that Keats met Coleridge walking by 
Highgate Ponds and it is recorded that Keats, wishing 
with a sudden sense of the mortality of poets, to "carry 
away the memory" of meeting Coleridge, asked to 
press his hand. When Keats had gone, Coleridge, 
turned to his friend Green and said, "There is death 

[52] 



LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI 
in that hand." He described it afterwards as "a heat 
and a dampness" — but "fever-dew" is Keats' own 
word. 

There are many other lesser reminiscences and 
influences in the poem, on which we might speculate 
— Spenser's "Faery Queen," the ballad of Thomas the 
Rhymer, Malory's "Lady of the Lake," Coleridge's 
"Kubla Khan" with its singing maiden and the 
poet's honey-dew, traceable in Keats' "honey wild and 
manna dew," an echo from Browne "Let no bird 
sing," and from Wordsworth "her eyes are wild"; 
but these are relatively unimportant. 

History and Psychology are interdependent sciences 
and yet the field of historical literary research is al- 
most overcrowded with surveyors, while the actual 
psychology of creative art is country still pictured in 
our text-books as Terra Incognita, the rumoured 
abode of Phoenix and Manticor. The spirit of ad- 
venture made me feel myself a regular Sir John 
Mandeville when I began even comparing Keats' two 
descriptions of Fanny as he first knew her with the 
lady of the poem, noting the "tolerable" foot, the 
agreeable hair, the elfin grace and elvish manners, 
in transformation: wondering, did the Knight-at-arms 
set her on his steed and walk beside so as to see her 
commended profile at best advantage? When she 
turned towards him to sing, did the natural thinness 
and paleness which Keats noted in Fanny's full-face, 
form the association-link between his thoughts of love 
and death? What was the real reason of the "kisses 

[53] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

four"? was it not perhaps four because of the painful 
doubleness of the tragic vision — ^was it extravagant to 
suppose that two of the kisses were more properly 
pennies laid on the eyes of death? 

The peculiar value of the ballad for speculation 
on the birth of poetry is that the version that we know 
best, the one incorporated in the journal-letter to 
America, bears every sign of being a very early draft. 
When Keats altered it later, it is noteworthy that he 
changed the "kisses four" stanza to the infinitely less 
poignant: — 

. . . there she gazed and sighed deep, 
And here I shut her wild sad eyes — 
So kissed asleep. 

Sir S. Golvin suggests that the kisses four were "too 
quaint": Keats may have told himself that this was 
the reason for omitting them, but it is more likely 
that without realizing it he is trying to limit the pain- 
ful doubleness: the change of "wild wild eyes" which 
I understand as meaning "wild" in two senses, elf- 
wild and horror-wild, to "wild sad eyes" would have 
the same effect. 

In writing all this I am sorry if I have offended 
those who, so to speak, prefer in their blindness to 
bow down to wood and stone, who shrink from hav- 
ing the particular variety of their religious experience 
analyzed for them. This section is addressed to those 
braver minds who can read "The Golden Bough" 
from cover to cover and still faithfully, with no 

[54] 



THE GENERAL ELLIOTT 

dawning contempt, do reverence to the gods of their 
youth. 

XVIII 
THE GENERAL ELLIOTT 

IT is impossible to be sure of one's ground when 
theorizing solely from the work of others, and 
for commenting on the half-comedy of my own, 
"The General Elliott," I have the excuse of a letter 
printed below. It was sent me by an American 
colonel whose address I do not know, and if he comes 
across these paragraphs I hope he will understand that 
I intended no rudeness in not answering his enquiries. 
This is the poem: — 

THE GENERAL ELLIOTT 

He fell in victory's pierce pursuit, 

Holed through and through with shot, 

A sabre sweep had hacked him deep 
Twixt neck and shoulderknot. . . 

The potman cannot well recall, 

The ostler never knew, 
Whether his day was Malplaquet, 

The Boyne or Waterloo. 

But there he hangs for tavern sign, 

With foolish bold regard 
For cock and hen and loitering men 

And wagons down the yard. 

[55] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

Raised high above the hayseed world 

He smokes his painted pipe, 
And now surveys the orchard ways, 

The damsons clustering ripe. 
He sees the churchyard slabs beyond, 

Where country neighbours lie, 
Their brief renown set lowly down; 

His name assaults the sky. 

He grips the tankard of brown ale 
That spills a generous foam: 

Oft-times he drinks, they say, and winks 
At drunk men lurching home. 

No upstart hero may usurp 
That honoured swinging seat; 

His seasons pass with pipe and glass 
Until the tale's complete. 

And paint shall keep his buttons bright 
Though all the world's forgot 

Whether he died for England's pride 
By battle, or by pot. 



And this is the letter; 



"April, 1921. 



"Mj dear Mr, Graves^ — 

"Friday, I had the pleasure of reading your lines 
to "The General Elliott" in The Spectator, 
Yesterday afternoon, about sunset, on returning 
across fields to Oxford from a visit to Boar's Hill, 
to my delight and surprise I found myself suddenly 
confronted with the General Elliott himself, or rather 

[56] 



THE GENERAL ELLIOTT 

the duplicate presentment of him — nailed to a tree. 
But could it be the same, I asked. He did not grip 
the tankard of brown ale that spills a generous foam 
r — nor did his seasons seem to pass with pipe and 
glass — and alas, nor did paint keep his tarnished 
buttons bright. In spite of your assertion, is the 
general's tale not already complete? Was he not 
(like me) but a "temporory officer"? Or have I 
perhaps seen a spurious General Elliott? He should 
not die; the post from which he views the world is 
all too lonely for his eyes to be permitted to close 
upon that scene, albeit the churchyard slabs do 
not come within the range. . . . May / help to restore 
him? 

"Sincerely, 

"J B 

"Lt. Col. U. S. A." 

To which letter I would reply, if I had his 
address: — 



My dear Colonel B 

. . . The poet very seldom writes about what 
he is observing at the moment. Usually a poem that 
has been for a long while maturing unsuspected in 
the unconscious mind, is brought to birth by an out- 
side shock, often quite a trivial one, but one which — 
as midwives would say — leaves a distinct and peculiar 
birthmark on the child. 

The inn which you saw at Hinksey is the only 
[57] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 
"General Elliott" I know, but I do not remember 
ever noticing a picture of him. I remember only a 
board 



THE GENERAL ELLIOTT. 
MORRELL'S ALES AND STOUT. 



and have never even had a drink there; but once I 
asked a man working in the garden who this General 
Elliott was, and he answered that really he didn't 
know; he reckoned he was a line soldier and killed 
somewhere long ago in a big battle. As a matter of 
fact, I find now that Elliott was the great defender 
of Gibraltar from 1779 to 1783, who survived to be- 
come Lord Heathfield; but that doesn't affect the 
poem. Some months after this conversation I 
passed the sign board again and suddenly a whole 
lot of floating material crystallized in my mind and 
the following verse came into my head — more or less 
as I quote it: — 

"Was it Schellenberg, General Elliott, 

Or Minden or Waterloo 
Where the bullet struck your shoulderknot, 

And the sabre shore your arm, 
And the bayonet ran you through?" 

On which lines a poem resulted which seemed un- 
satisfactory, even after five drafts. I rewrote in a 
different style a few days later and after several more 
drafts the poem stood as it now stands. There appear 

[58] 



THE GENERAL ELLIOTT 

to be more than one set of conflicting emotions rec- 
onciled in this poem. In the false start referred to, 
the 1. A. idea was not properly balanced by 1. B. and 
1. C, which necessitated reconstruction of the whole 
scheme; tinkering wouldn't answer. I analyze the 
final version as follows: — 

A. Admiration for a real old-fashioned 
General beloved by his whole division, 
killed in France (1915) while trying to 
make a broken regiment return to the 
attack. He was directing operations from 
the front line, an unusual place for a 

1. divisional commander in modern warfare. 

B. Disgust for the incompetence and folly of 
several other generals under whom I 
served; their ambition and jealousy, their 

recklessness of the lives of others. 
G. Affection, poised between scorn and 
admiration, for an extraordinary thick- 
headed, kind-hearted militia Colonel, who 
w^as fond enough of the bottle, and in 
private life a big farmer. He was very 
ignorant of military matters but somehow 
got through his job surprisingly well. 

2. A. My hope of settling down to a real 

country life in the sort of surroundings 
that the two Hinkseys afford, sick of 
nearly five years soldiering. It occurred 
to me that the inn must have been founded 
[59] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

by an old soldier who felt much as I did 
then. Possibly General Elliott himself, 
when he was dying, had longed to be back 
in these very parts with his pipe and glass 
and a view of the orchard. It would have 
been a kind thought to paint a signboard 
of him so, like one I saw once (was it in 
Somerset or Dorset?) — "The Jolly Drink- 
er" and not like the usual grim, military 
scowl of "General Wellington's" and "Gen- 
eral Wolfe's." 
B. I ought to have known who Elliott was be- 
cause, I used once to pride myself as an 
authority on military history. The names 
of Schellenberg, Minden, Malplaquet, The 
Boyne (though only the two middle 
battles appear on the colours as battle 
honours) are imperishable glories for 
the Royal Welch Fusilier. And the 
finest Colonel this regiment ever had, 
Ellis, was killed at Waterloo; he had ap- 
parently on his own initiative moved his 
battalion from the reserves into a gap in 
the first line. 

A. My own faith in the excellent qualities 
of our national beverage. 

B. A warning inscription on a tomb at 
Winchester over a private soldier who died 
of drink. But his comrades had added a 
couplet — "An honest soldier ne'er shall be 

[60] 



THE GENERAL ELLIOTT 

forgot, Whether he died by musket or by 
pot." 
There are all sorts of other sentiments mixed up, 
which still elude me, but this seems enough for an 
answer. . . . 

Yours sincerely, 

R. G. —(late Captain R. W. F.) 

Poe's account of the series of cold-blooded delib- 
erations that evolved "The Raven" is sometimes ex- 
plained as an attempt in the spirit of "Ask me no 
questions, and I'll tell you no lies," to hoodwink a 
too curious Public. A juster suggestion would be 
that Poe was quite honest in his record, but that the 
painful nature of the emotions which combined to 
produce the poem prompted him afterwards to un- 
intentional dishonesty in telling the story. In my ac- 
count of "The General Elliott" there may be similar 
examples of false rationalization long after the event, 
but that is for others to discover: and even so, I am 
not disqualified from suggesting that the bird of ill 
omen, perching at night on the head of Wisdom 
among the books of a library, is symbolism too par- 
ticularly applicable to Poe's own disconsolate morbid 
condition to satisfy us as having been deducted by 
impersonal logic. 

It is likely enough that Poe worked very hard at 
later drafts of the poem and afterwards remembered 
his deliberate conscious universalizing of an essen- 
tially personal symbolism : but that is a very different 

[61] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

matter from pretending that he approached "The 
Raven" from the first with the same cold reasoning 
care that constructed, for instance, his Gold-Bug 
cipher. 

XIX 
THE GOD CALLED POETRY 

APIECE with this title which appeared in 
my "Country Sentiment" was the first im- 
pulse to more than one of the main con- 
tentions in this book, and at the same time supplies 
perhaps the clearest example I can give of the thought- 
machinery that with greater luck and cunning may 
produce something like Poetry. I wrote it without 
being able to explain exactly what it was all about, 
but I had a vision in my mind of the God of Poetry 
having two heads like Janus, one savage, scowling 
and horrible, the face of Blackbeard the Pirate, the 
other mild and gracious, that of John the Evangelist. 
Without realizing the full implication of the symbo- 
lism, I wrote :- 

Then speaking from his double head 
The glorious fearful monster said, 

"I am Yes and I am No 
Black as pitch and white as snow; 
Love me, hate me, reconcile 
Hate with love, perfect with vile. 
So equal justice shall be done 
And life shared between moon and sun. 

[62] 



THE GOD CALLED POETRY 

Nature for you shall curse or smile; 
A poet you shall be, my son." 

The poem so far as I can remember was set going by 
the sight of . . . a guard of honour drilling on the 
barrack-square of a camp near Liverpool! I was 
standing at the door of the Courts-Martial room 
where I was shortly to attend at the trial of a de- 
serter (under the Military Service Act) who had 
unsuccessfully pleaded conscientious objection be- 
fore a tribunal and had been in hiding for some 
weeks before being arrested. Now, I had been long 
pondering about certain paradoxical aspects of Poe- 
try and, particularly, contrasting the roaring genius 
of Christopher Marlowe with that of his gentle con- 
temporary Shakespeare; so, standing there watching 
the ceremonial drill, I fancifully made the officer in 
command of the guard, a young terror from Sand- 
hurst, into a Marlowe strutting, ranting, shouting 
and cursing — but making the men move; tlici- I 
imagined Shakespeare in his place. Shakespeare 
would never have done to command a guard of hon- 
our, and they would have hated him at Camberley or 
Chelsea. He would have been like a brother-officer 
who was with me a few weeks before in this ex- 
tremely "regimental" camp; he hated all the "ser- 
geant-major business" and used sometimes on this 
barrack square to be laughing so much at the absurd 
pomposity of the drill as hardly to be able to 
control his word of command. I had more than 
once seen him going out, beltless, but with a pipe 

[63] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

and a dog, for a pleasant walk in the country when 
he should really have been on parade. In France, 
however, this officer was astonishing: the men 
would do anything for him and his fighting feats had 
already earned him the name of Mad Jack in a 
shock-division where military fame was as fugitive 
as life. This brother-officer, it is to be noted, was a 
poet, and had a violent feeling against the Military 
Service Act. I wondered how he would behave if he 
were in my place, sitting on the Court-Martial ; or how 
would Shakespeare? Marlowe, of course, would 
thunder "two years" at the accused with enormous 
relish, investing the cause of militarism with a mag- 
nificent poetry. But Shakespeare, or "Mad Jack"? 
That night in the quarters which I had once shared 
with "Mad Jack," I began writing: — 

"/ begin to know at last. 
These nights when I sit down to rhyme, 
The form and measure of that vast 
God we call Poetry. . . . 

. . . / see he has two heads 
Like Janus, calm, benignant this. 
That grim and scowling. His beard spreads 
From chin to chin; this God has power 
Immeasurable at every hour. . . . 

The black beard scowls and says to me 
''Human frailty though you be 
Yet shout and crack your whip, be harsh; 
They'll obey you in the end, 

[64] 



THE GOD CALLED POETRY 

Hill and field, river and marsh 
Shall obey you, hop and skip 
At the terrour of your whip, 
To your gales of anger bend. 

The pale beard smiles and says in turn 
'^True, a prize goes to the stern 
But sing and laugh and easily run 
Through the wide airs of my plain; 
Bathe in my waters, drink my sun. 
And draw my creatures with soft song; 
They shall follow you along 
Graciously, with no doubt or pain." 

Then speaking from his double head, etc. 

The rather scriptural setting of what the pale beard 
said was probably suggested by the picture I had 
formed in my mind of the conscientious objector, 
whom I somehow sympathetically expected to be an 
earnest Christian, mild and honest; as a matter of 
fact, he turned out to be the other kind, violent and 
shifty alternately. He was accordingly sentenced 
by Major Tamburlaine and Captains Guise and 
Bajazeth, to the customary term of imprison- 
ment. 

And by the way, talking of Marlowe and Shakes- 
peare ; — 

Here ranted Isaac's elder son, 
The proud shag-breasted godless one 
From whom observant Smooth-cheek stole 
Birth-right, blessing, hunter's soul. 

[65] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

XX 

LOGICALIZATION 

John King is dead, that good old man 

You ne'er shall see him more. 
He used to wear a long brown coat 

All buttoned down before. 

Apparently a simple statement, this rustic epitaph has 
for any sensitive reader a curiously wistful quality 
and the easiest way I can show the mixed feelings it 
stirs, is by supposing a typical eighteenth-century 
writer to have logicalized them into a polite epigram. 
The poem would appear mutilated as follows: — 

Hereunder lies old John Brown's honoured dust: 
His worthy soul has flown to Heav'n we trust. 
Yet still we mourn his vanished russet smock 
While frowning fates our trifling mem'ries mock. 

Many of the subtler implications are necessarily lost 
in the formal translation for in poetry the more stand- 
ardized the machinery of logical expression, the less 
emotional power is accumulated. But the force of 
the words "he used to wear" is shown in more obvious 
opposition to the words "dead" and "good." The 
importance of "good" will appear at once if we sub- 
stitute some word like "ancient" for "good old" and 
see the collapse of the poetic fabric, still more if we 
change "good" to "bad" and watch the effect it has 

[66] 



LOGICALIZATION 

in our imaginations on the "you ne'er shall see him 
more," the cut of his coat, and the reasons John King 
had for buttoning it. Good John King wore a long 
brown coat because he was old and felt the cold and 
because, being a neat old man, he wished to conceal 
his ragged jacket and patched small-clothes. Bad 
John King kept pheasants, hares, salmon and silver 
spoons buttoned for concealment under his. How did 
good John King die? A Christian death in bed sur- 
rounded by weeping neighbours, each begging a coat- 
button for keepsake. Bad John King? Waylaid 
and murdered one dark night by an avenger, and 
buried where he fell, still buttoned in his long brown 
coat. 

The emotional conflict enters curiously into such 
one-strand songs as Blake's "Infant Joy" from the 
Songs of Innocence, a poem over which for the grown 
reader the sharp sword of Experience dangles from a 
single horsehair. The formal version (which I beg 
nobody to attempt even in fun) logicalized in creak- 
ing sonnet-form would have the octave filled with an 
address to the Melancholy of Sophistication, the 
sestet reserved for: — 

But thou, Blest Infant, smiling radiantly 
Hast taught me etc, etc. 

An immoral but far more entertaining parlour 
game than logicalization — perhaps even a profit- 
able trade — would be to extract the essentials from 
some long-winded but sincere Augustan poem, dis- 

[67] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

guise the self-conscious antitheses, modernize the 
diction, liven up the rhythm, fake a personal twist, 
and publish. Would there be no pundit found to 
give it credit as a poem of passion and originality? 
I hope this suggestion for a New-Lamps-for-Old In- 
dustry will not meet the eye of those advanced but ill- 
advised English Masters who are now beginning to 
supervise with their red-and-blue pencils the writing 
of English Poetry in our schools. 

Now, the trouble about the use of logic in poetry 
seems not to be that logic isn't a very useful and 
(rightly viewed) a very beautiful invention, but that 
it finds little place in our dreams : dreams are illogical 
as a child's mind is illogical, and spontaneous un- 
doctored poetry, like the dream, represents the com- 
plications of adult experience translated into thought- 
processes analogous to, or identical with, those of 
childhood. 

This I regard as a very important view, and it ex- 
plains, to my satisfaction at any rate, a number of 
puzzling aspects of poetry, such as the greater emo- 
tional power on the average reader's mind of simple 
metres and short homely words with an occasional 
long strange one for wonder; also, the difficulty of 
introducing a foreign or unusual prosody into poems 
of intense passion: also the very much wider use in 
poetry than in daily speech of animal, bird, cloud 
and flower imagery, of Biblical types characters and 
emblems, of fairies and devils, of legendary heroes 
and heroines, which are the stock-in-trade of imagin- 

[68] 



LIMITATIONS 

ative childhood; also, the constant appeal poetry- 
makes to the childish habits of amazed wondering, 
sudden terrors, laughter to signify mere joy, frequent 
tears and similar manifestations of imcontrolled emo- 
tion which in a grown man and especially an English- 
man are considered ridiculous; following this last, 
the reason appears for the strict Classicist's dislike 
of the ungovemed Romantic, the dislike being appar- 
ently founded on a feeling that to wake this child- 
spirit in the mind of a grown person is stupid and 
even disgusting, an objection that has similarly been 
raised to the indiscriminate practice of psycho-anal- 
ysis, which involves the same process. 

XXI 
LIMITATIONS 

ONE of the most embarrassing limitations 
of poetry is that the language you use is 
not your own to do entirely what you like 
with. Times actually come when in the conscious 
stage of composition you have to consult a diction- 
ary or another writer as to what word you are going 
to use. It is no longer practical to coin words, 
resurrect obsolete ones and generally to tease the 
language as the Elizabethans did. A great living 
English poet, Mr. Charles Doughty, is apparently a 
disquieting instance to the contrary. But he has 
lost his way in the centuries; he belongs really to 

[69] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 
the sixteenth. English has never recovered its 
happy-go-lucky civilian slouch since the more than 
Prussian stiffening it was given by the eighteenth 
century drill-sergeants. 

It is intolerable to feel so bound compared with 
the freedom of a musician or a sculptor; in spite of 
the exactions of that side of the art, the poet cannot 
escape into mere rhythmic sound; there is always 
the dead load of sense to drag about with him. I 
have often felt I would like to be a painter at work 
on a still life, puzzling out ingenious relationships 
between a group of objects varying in form, texture 
and colour. Then when people came up and asked 
me: "Tell me, sir, is that a Spode jar?" or "Isn't 
that a very unusual variety of lily?" I would be able 
to wave them away placidly; the questions would be 
irrelevant. But I can't do that in poetry, everything 
is relevant; it is an omnibus of an art — a public 
omnibus. 

There are consolations, of course; poetry, to be 
appreciated, is not, like music, dependent on a middle- 
man, the interpretative artist; nor, once in print, is 
it so liable to damage from accident, deterioration 
or the reproducer as the plastic arts. 



[70] 



THE NAUGHTY BOY 

XXH 
THE NAUGHTY BOY 

BOUND up with the business of controlling 
the association-ghosts which haunt in their 
millions every word of the English language, 
there is the great mesmeric art of giving mere fancy an 
illusion of solid substance. The chief way this is 
done, and nobody has ever done it better than Keats, 
is constantly to make appeals to each of the different 
bodily senses, especially those more elementary ones 
of taste, touch, smell, until they have unconsciously 
built up a scene which is as real as anything can be. 
As an example of the way Keats rung the changes 
on the senses, take his "Song about Myself" : — 

There was a naughty Boy 
And a naughty boy was 
he 
He ran away to Scotland 
The people for to see 
Then he found 
That the ground 
Was as hard, 
That a yard 
Was as long, 
That a song 
Was as merry. 
That a cherry 
Was as red — 
[71] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

That lead 
Was as weighty, 
That fourscore 
Was as eighty, 
That a door 
Was as wooden 
As in Eno;land — 



'D' 



So he stood in his shoes 

And he wonder'd, 

He wonder'd, 
He stood in his shoes 

And he wonder'd. 

Here we have a succession of staccato notes, but 
in the "Eve of St. Agnes" or "Ode to Autumn" al- 
most every phrase is a chord, the individual notes 
of which each strike a separate sense. 

XXIII 
THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC IDEAS 

WHEN Aristotle lays down that poets de- 
scribe the thing that might be, but that 
the historian (like the natural historians 
above mentioned) merely describes that which has 
been, and that poetry is something of "more philoso- 
phic, graver import than history because its statements 
are of a universal nature" so far his idea of poetry 
tallies with our own. But when he explains his "might 
be" as meaning the "probable and necessary" accord- 

[72] 



THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC IDEAS 

ing to our every-day experience of life, then we feel 
the difference between the Classical and Romantic 
conceptions of the art — Aristotle was trying to weed 
poetry of all the symbolic extravagances and impossi- 
bilities of the dream state in which it seems to have 
originated, and to confine it within rational and edu- 
cative limits. Poetry was with him only an intuitive 
imitation of how typical men think and react upon 
each other when variously stimulated. It was what 
we might call the straight goods of thought conveyed 
in the traditional magic hampers; but there proved to 
be difficulties in the packing; the Classical ideal was, 
in practice, modified by the use of heroic diction and 
action, conventional indications to the audience that 
"imitation" was not realism, and that there must be 
no criticisms on that score; every one must "go un- 
der" to the hypnotic suggestion of the buskin and the 
archaic unnatural speech, and for once think ideally. 
For the same reason the Classical doctrine lays stress 
on the importance of the set verse-forms and the 
traditional construction of drama. For the benefit 
of my scientific readers, if my literary friends prom- 
ise not to listen to what I am saying, I will attempt 
a definition of Classical and Romantic notions of 
Poetry:— 

Classical is characteristic and Romantic is Meta- 
morphic, that is, though they are both expressions of 
a mental conflict, in Classical poetry this conflict is 
expressed within the confines of waking probability 
and logic, in terms of the typical interaction of typi- 

[73] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

cal minds; in Romantic poetry the conflict is ex- 
pressed in the illogical but vivid method of dream- 
changings. 

The dream origin of Romantic Poetry gives it the 
advantage of putting the audience in a state of mind 
ready to accept it; in a word, it has a naturally hyp- 
notic effect. Characteristic poetry, which is social 
rather than personal, and proudly divorced from the 
hit-and-miss methods of the dream, yet feels the need 
of this easy suggestion to the audience for ideal think- 
ing; and finds it necessary to avoid realism by bor- 
rowing shreds of accredited metamorphic diction and 
legend and building with them an illusion of real 
metamorphism. So the Hermit Crab, and once it 
has taken up a cast-off shell to cover its nakedness, 
it becomes a very terror among the whelks. The 
borrowed Metamorphism is hardened to a convention 
and a traditional form, and can be trusted almost in- 
evitably to induce the receptive state in an average 
audience wherever used. Such a convention as I 
mean is the May-day dream of the Mediaeval 
rhymed moralities or the talking beasts of the fabu- 
lists. 

Sometimes, however, owing to a sudden adventur- 
ous spirit appearing in the land, a nation's Classical 
tradition is broken by popular ridicule and the re- 
appearance of young Metamorphic Poets. But after 
a little paper-bloodshed and wranglings in the coffee- 
houses, the Classical tradition reappears, dressed up 
in the cast-off finery of the pioneer Metamorphics 

[74] 



THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC IDEAS 

(who have by this time been succeeded by licentious 
and worthless pyrotechnists), and rules securely 
again. It is only fair to observe that the Romantic 
Revivalist often borrows largely from some Classical 
writer so obscured by Time and corrupt texts as to 
seem a comparative Romantic. This complicated 
dog-eat-dog process is cheerfully called "The Tradi- 
tion of English Poetry." 

There is an interesting line of investigation which 
I have no space to pursue far, in a comparison be- 
tween the Classicism of Wit and the Romanticism 
of Humour. 

Wit depends on a study of the characteristic re- 
actions of typical men to typically incongruous cir- 
cumstances, and changed little from Theophrastus 
to Joe Miller. It depends for its effect very largely 
on the set form and careful diction, e. g: — 

A certain inn-keeper of Euboea, with gout in his 
fingers, returned to his city after sacrificing an Ox to 
Delphic Apollo. . . . The celebrated wit, Sidney 
Smith, one day encountered Foote the comedian, in 
the Mall. . . . An Englishman, an Irishman and a 
Scotchman agreed on a wager of one hundred 
guineas . . . 

That is Classicism. 

Romantic humour is marked by the extravagant 
improbability of dream-vision and by the same 
stereoscopic expression as in Romantic poetry. 

Would Theophrastus have deigned to laugh at the 
fabliau of "The Great Panjandrum himself with the 

[75] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

little round button at top?" I think not. Our lead- 
ing living Classical poet was recently set a Romantic 
riddle as a test of his humour, "What did the tooth- 
paste say to the tooth brush?" Answer: "Squeeze 
me and I'll meet you outside the Tube." The bard 
was angry. "Who on earth squeezes his tube of 
tooth-paste with his tooth brush? Your riddle does 
not hold water." He could understand the fable 
convention of inanimate objects talking, but this 
other was not "the probable and necessary." 

XXIV 

COLOUR 

THE naming of colours in poetry may be used 
as a typical instance of the circumspection 
with which a poet is forced to move. The 
inexperienced one drenches his poems in gold, silver, 
purple, scarlet, with the idea of giving them, in fact, 
"colour." The old hand almost never names a col- 
our unless definitely presenting the well-known child- 
ish delight for bright colours, with the aid of some 
other indication of childhood, or unless definitely to 
imply a notable change from the normal nature of 
the coloured object, or at least some particular 
quality such as the ripeness of the cherry in 
Keats' song just quoted. But even then he usually 
prefers to find a way round, for the appeal to the 
sense of colour alone is a most insecure way of 

[76] 



COLOUR 

creating an illusion ; colours vary in mood by so very 
slight a change in shade or tone that pure colour 
named without qualification in a poem will seldom 
call up any precise image or mood. 

To extemporize a couple of self-conscious black- 
board examples: — 

I. "Then Mary came dressed in a robe that was green 

And her white hands and neck were a sight to be 
seen." 

II. "Mary's robe was rich pasture, her neck and her 

hands 
Were glimpses of river that dazzled those lands." 

The first couplet has not nearly so much colour in 
it as the second, although in the first the mantle is 
definitely called green and the lady's hands and neck, 
white, while in the second no colour is mentioned at 
all. The first robe is as it were coloured in a cheap 
painting-book; the green paint has only come off the 
cake in a thin yellowish solution and the painting- 
book instructions for colouring the hands and 
neck were "leave blank." The second robe derives 
its far richer colour from the texture that the pasture 
simile suggests; the flesh parts get their whiteness 
from the suggestion of sun shining on water. 



[77] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

XXV 
PUTTY 

THE conscious part of composition is like the 
finishing of roughly shaped briars in a pipe 
factory. Where there are flaws in the wood, 
putty has to be used in order to make the pipe 
presentable. Only an expert eye can tell the putty 
when it has been coloured over, but there it is, time 
will reveal it and nobody is more aware of its presence 
now than the man who put it there. The public is 
often gulled into paying two guineas for a well- 
coloured straight-grain, when a tiny patch of putty 
under the bowl pulls down its sentimental value to 
ten shillings or so. 

It is only fair to give an example of putty in a 
poem of my own; in writing songs, where the pattern 
is more fixed than in any other form, putty is almost 
inevitable. This song started sincerely and cheer- 
fully enough: — 

Once there came a mighty furious wind 

(So old worthies tell). 
It blew the oaks like ninepins down, 
And all the chimney stacks in town 

Down together fell. 
That was a wind — to write a record on, 
to hang a story on, 
to sing a ballad on, 

[78] 



PUTTY 

To ring the loud church bell! 
But for one huge storm that cracks the sky 
Came a thousand lesser winds rustling by, 
And the only wind that will make me sing 
Is breeze of summer or gust of spring 
But no more hurtful thing. 

This was leading up to a final verse: — 

Once my sweetheart spoke an unkind word 

As I myself must tell, 
For none but I have seen or heard 
My sweetheart to such cruelty stirred 

For one who loved her well. 
That was a word — to write no record on, 
to hang no story on, 
to sing no ballad on, 

To ring no loud church bell ! 
Yet for one fierce word that has made me smart 
Ten thousand gentle ones ease my heart. 
So all the song that springs in me 
Is "Never a sweetheart bom could be 
So kind as only she." 

Half-way through this verse I was interrupted, and 
had to finish the poem consciously as best I could. 
On picking it up again, apparently I needed another 
middle verse of exactly the same sort of pattern as 
the first, to prepare the reader for the third. Search- 
ing among natural phenomena, I had already hit on 
drought as being a sufficiently destructive plague to 
be long remembered by old worthies. This would 
make the second verse. 

[79] ' 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 
So without more ado I started: — 

Once there came a mighty thirsty drought 

(So old worthies tell). 
The quags were drained, the brooks were dried, 
Cattle and sheep and pigs all died, 

The parson preached on Hell. 
That was a drought — to write a record on etc. 

So far I had concealed the poverty of my inspiration 
well enough, I flattered myself, but here we were 
stuck, my self-conscious muse and I. What was a 
pleasing diminutive of drought? — Pleasant sunshine? 
Not quite; the thirstiness of nature doesn't show in 
pleasant sunshine at all. So, knowing all the time 
that I was doing wrong, I took my putty knife and 
slapped the stuff on thick, then trimmed and smoothed 
over carefully: — 

BuLfor one long drought of world-wide note 
Come a thousand lesser ones on man's throat, 
And the only drought for my singing mood 
Is a thirst for the very best ale that's brewed. 
Soon quenched, but soon renewed. 

In manuscript, the putty didn't show, somehow, but 
I am ashamed to say I published the song. And in 
print, it seemed to show disgracefully. "It was the 
best butter," said the March Hare. "It was the best 
putty," I echoed, to excuse myself. But there is too 
much of it; the last half of the last verse even, is not 
all sound wood. This poem has been on my con- 
science for some time. 

[80] 



READING ALOUD 

If spontaneous poetry is like the Genie from 
Aladdin's Lamp, this conscious part of the art is like 
the assemblage of sheet, turnip-head, lighted candle 
and rake to make the village ghost. 

As I were a trapesin' 
To Fox and Grapes Inn 

To get I a bottle of ginger wine 
I saw summat 
In they old tummut 

And Lordie how his eyes did shine! 

Suffolk rhyme, 
(Cetera desunt) 

The Genie is the most powerful magic of the two, 
and surest of its effect, but the Turnip Ghost is usually 
enough to startle rustics who wander at night, into 
prayer, sobriety, rapid movement or some other un- 
usual state. 

XXVI 
READING ALOUD 

THOUGH it is a sound principle that the poet 
should write as if his work were first of all 
intended to be repeated from mouth to 
mouth, recitation or reading aloud actually distracts 
attention from the subtler properties of a poem, which 
though addressed nominally to the ear, the eye has to 
see in black and white before they can be appreciated. 
A beautiful voice can make magic of utter nonsense; 

[81] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 
I have been taken in by this sort of thing too often. 
The eye is the most sophisticated organ of sense and 
is therefore the one to which the poet must make a 
final appeal in critical matters, but as limited an 
appeal as possible when he is engaged in the art of 
illusion. The universal use of printing has put too 
much work on the eye : which has learned to skip and 
cut in self-defence. Ask any one who has read 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT the name of the hero. 
It is probable that he will remember the initial letter, 
possible that he will be able to repeat the whole name 
more or less recognizably, unlikely that he will be 
able to spell it correctly, almost certain that he will 
not have troubled to find out the correct pronunci- 
ation in Russian. 



XXVII 
L'ARTE BELLA PITTURA 

A SCIENTIFIC treatise could, I suppose, be 
written on how to manipulate vowels and 
consonants so as to hurry or slow down 
rhythm, and suggest every different emotion by mere 
sound sequence but this is for every poet to find out 
for himself and practise automatically as a painter 
mixes his paints. 

There was once an old Italian portrait painter, who 
coming to the end of his life, gathered his friends 

[82] 



L'ARTE BELLA PITTURA 
and pupils together and revealed to them a great 
discovery he had made, as follows: — 

"The art of portrait painting consists in putting 
the High Lights in exactly the right place in the eyes." 

When I come to my death-bed I have a similarly 
important message to deliver: — 

'The art of poetry consists in knowing exactly how 
to manipulate the letter S." 



XXVIII 
ON WRITING MUSICALLY 

IN true poetry the mental bracing and relaxing 
on receipt of sensuous impressions, which we 
may call the rhythm of emotions, conditions the 
musical rhythm. This rhythm of emotions also de- 
termines the sound-texture of vowels and consonants, 
so that Metre, as schoolboys understand it when they 
are made to scan: — Friends, R5m|ans, count |rymen, 
lend me|your ears!, has in spontaneous poetry only a 
submerged existence. For the moment I will content 
myself by saying that if all words in daily speech 
were spoken at the same rate, if all stressed syllables 
and all unstressed syllables, similarly, were dwelt on 
for exactly the same length of time, as many proso- 
dists assume, poetry would be a much easier art to 
practise; but it is the haste with which we treat some 
parts of speech, the deliberation we give to others, and 

[83] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

the wide difference in the weight of syllables com- 
posed of thin or broad vowels and liquid or rasping 
consonants, that make it impossible for the Anglo- 
French theory of only two standardized sound values, 
long or short, to be reasonably maintained. A far 
more subtle notation must be adopted, and if it must 
be shown on a black-board, poetry will appear marked 
out not in "feet" but in convenient musical bars, with 
the syllables resolved into quaver, dotted crotchet, 
semibreve and all the rest of them. Metre in the 
classical sense of an orderly succession of iambuses, 
trochees or whatnot, is forced to accept the part of 
policeman in the Harlequinade, a mere sparring 
partner for Rhythm the Clown who with his string of 
sausages is continually tripping him up and beating 
him over the head, and Texture the Harlequin who 
steals his truncheon and helmet. This preparatory 
explanation is necessary because if I were to pro- 
claim in public that "the poet must write musically" 
it would be understood as an injunction to write like 
Thomas Moore, or his disciples of today. 

XXIX 
THE USE OF POETRY 

AT this stage the question of the use of poetry 
to its readers may be considered briefly and 
without rhapsody. Poetry as the Greeks 
knew when they adopted the Drama as a cleansing 

[84] 



THE USE OF POETRY 

rite of religion, is a form of psycho-therapy. Be- 
ing the transformation into dream symbolism of some 
disturbing emotional crisis in the poet's mind 
(whether dominated by delight or pain) poetry has 
the power of homoeopathically healing other men's 
minds similarly troubled, by presenting them under 
the spell of hypnosis with an allegorical solution of 
the trouble. Once the allegory is recognized, by 
the reader's unconscious mind as applicable the affec- 
tive power of his own emotional crisis is diminished. 
Apparently on a recognition of this aspect of poetry 
the Greeks founded their splendid emblem of its 
power — the polished shield of Perseus that mirrored 
the Gorgon's head with no hurtful effect and allowed 
the hero to behead her at his ease. A well chosen an- 
thology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the 
more common mental disorders, and may be used as 
much for prevention as cure if we are to believe Mr. 
Housman's argument in "Terence, this is stupid stuff" 
no. LXII of his Shropshire Lad, 

The musical side of poetry is, properly understood, 
not merely a hypnotic inducement to the reader to 
accept suggestions, but a form of psycho-therapy in 
itself, which, working in conjunction with the pictorial 
allegory, immensely strengthens its chance of success. 



[85] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

XXX 

HISTORIES OF POETRY 

THE History of English Poetry is a subject I 
hope I shall never have to undertake, es- 
pecially as I have grave doubts if there really 
is such a thing. Poets appear spasmodically, write 
their best poetry at uncertain intervals and owe noth- 
ing worth mentioning to any school or convention. 
Most histories of English Poetry are full of talk about 
"schools" or they concentrate on what they are 
pleased to call "the political tendencies" of poetry, 
and painfully trace the introduction and development 
in English of various set forms like the Sonnet, 
Blank Verse, and the Spenserian Stanza. This talk 
about politics I read as an excuse of the symmetrical- 
minded for spreading out the Eighteenth Century 
poets famous in their day to a greater length than the 
quality of their work can justify. As for the history 
of metric forms it is, in a sense, of little more vital 
importance to poetry than the study of numismatics 
would appear to an expert in finance. 

An undergraduate studying English Literature at 
one of our oldest universities was recently confronted 
by a senior tutor, Professor X, with a review of his 
terminal studies and the charge of temperamentalism. 

[86] 



THE BOWL MARKED DOG 

"I understand from Prof. Y," he explained, 
"that your literary judgments are a trifle sum- 
mary, that in fact you prefer some poets to 
others." 

He acknowledged the charge with all humility. 



I 



XXXI 

THE BOWL MARKED DOG 

', ' "^ AM sorry, nephew, that I cannot under^ 
stand your Modern Poetry. Indeed I strongly 
dislike it; it seems to me mostly mere impu- 
dence." 

"But, uncle, you are not expected to like it! 
The old house-dog goes at dinner time to the broken 
biscuits in his bowl marked dog and eats heartily. 
Tomorrow give him an unaccustomed dainty in an 
unaccustomed bowl and he will sniff and turn away 
in disgust. Though tempted to kick him for his 
unrecognizing stupidity, his ingratitude, his ridic- 
ulous preference for the formal biscuit, yet re- 
frain! 

"The sight and smell associations of the DOG bowl 
out of which he has eaten so long have actually, 
scientists say, become necessary for bringing the 
proper digestive juices into his mouth. What you 
offer him awakes no hunger, his mouth does not 
water; he is puzzled and insulted. 

"But give it to the puppies instead; they'll gobble 
[87] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 
it up and sniff contemptuously aftferwards at the 
old dog and his bowl of biscuit." 

XXXII 
THE ANALYTIC SPIRIT 

IN England, since — shall we name the convenient 
date 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition? — 
the educated reading public has developed ana- 
lytic powers which have not been generally matched 
by a corresponding development of the co-ordinating 
arts of the poet. Old charms will no longer hold, 
old baits will no longer be taken; the reader has be- 
come too wary. The triumph of the analytic spirit 
is nowhere better shown than in these histories of 
Poetry just mentioned, where the interest in fake 
poetry is just as strong or even stronger than the in- 
terest in poetry itself. 

As Religions inevitably die with their founders, 
the disciples having either to reject or formularize 
their master's opinions, so with Poetry, it dies on the 
formation of a poetic school. The analytic spirit 
has been, I believe, responsible both for the present 
coma of religion among our educated classes and for 
the disrespect into which poetry and the fine arts have 
fallen. As for these histories of poetry, the very 
fact that people are interested in failures of the 
various "Schools" to universalize the individual 
system of a master, is a great discouragement to a 

[88] 



RHYMES AND ALLITERATION 

poet trying by every means in his power to lay the 
spirit of sophistication. 

But the age of poetry is not yet over if poets will 
only remember what the word means and not confuse 
it with acrostic-making and similar ingenious 
Alexandrianisms. Earlier civilizations than ours 
have forgotten the necessarily spontaneous nature of 
the art, and have tried (for lack of any compelling 
utterance) to beat the sophisticated critics of their 
day by piling an immense number of technical 
devices on their verses, killing what little passion 
there was, by the tyranny of self-imposed rules. The 
antithetical couplet of Pope or the Ovidian hexameter- 
and-pentameter are bad enough, but the ancient 
Irish and Welsh bards were even more restricted by 
their chain-rhymes and systems of consonantal 
sequence, the final monstrosity being the Welsh englyn 
of four lines, governed by ninety-odd separate rules. 
The way out for Poetry does not lie by this road, we 
may be sure. But neither on the other hand do we 
yet need to call in the Da-da-ists. 

XXXIII 
RHYMES AND ALLITERATION 

RHYMES properly used are the good servants 
whose presence gives the dinner table a 
sense of opulent security; they are never 
awkward, they hand the dishes silently and pro- 

[89] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

fessionally. You can trust them not to interrupt the 
conversation of the table or allow their personal dis- 
agreements to come to the notice of the guests; but 
some of them are getting very old for their work. 

The principle governing the use of alliteration and 
rhyme appear to be much the same. In unsophisti- 
cated days an audience could be moved by the profuse 
straight-ahead alliteration of Piers Plowman, but this 
is too obvious a device for our times. The best 
effects seem to have been attained in more recent 
poetry by precisely (if unconsciously) gauging the 
memory length of a reader's mental ear and planting 
the second alliterative word at a point where the 
memory of the first is just beginning to blurr; but has 
not quite faded. By cross-alliteration on these lines 
a rich atmosphere has resulted and the reader's eye 
has been cheated. So with internal and ordinary 
rhyme ; but the memory length for the internal rhyme 
appears somewhat longer than memory for alliter- 
ation, and for ordinary rhyme, longer still. 

XXXIV 

AN AWKWARD FELLOW CALLED 
ARIPHRADES 

ARISTOTLE defended poetical "properties" 
that would correspond nowadays with 
"thine" and "whensoe'er" and "flowerets 
gay," by saying "it is a great thing indeed to make 

[90] 



AN AWKWARD FELLOW 
proper use of these poetic forms as also of compounds 
and strange words. The mere fact of their not being 
in ordinary speech, gives the diction a non-prosaic 
character." One Ariphrades had been ridiculing 
the Tragedians on this score; and Aristotle saw, I 
suppose, that a strange diction has for the simple- 
minded reader a power of surprise which enables the 
poet to work on his feelings unhindered, but he did 
not see that as soon as a single Ariphrades had 
ridiculed what was becoming a conventional surprise, 
a Jack-in-the-Box that every one expected, then was 
the time for the convention to be scrapped; ridicule 
is awkwardly catching. 

The same argument applies to the use of rhyme to- 
day; while rhyme can still be used as one of the 
ingredients of the illusion, a compelling force to make 
the reader go on till he hears an echo to the syllable 
at the end of the last pause, it still remains a valuable 
technical asset. But as soon as rhyme is worn thread- 
bare the ear anticipates the echo and is contemptuous 
of the clumsy trick. 

The reader must be made to surrender himself 
completely to the poet, as to his guide in a strange 
country; he must never be allowed to run ahead and 
say "Hurry up, sir, I know this part of the country 
as well as you. After that 'snow-capped mountain' 
we inevitably come to a 'leaping fountain.' I see it 
'dancing' and 'glancing' in the distance. And by the 
token of these 'varied flowers' on the grass, I know 
that another few feet will bring us to the 'leafy 

[91] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

bowers' which, if I am not mistaken, will protect us 
nicely from the 'April showers' for a few 'blissful 
hours.' Come on, sir! am I guiding you, or are you 
guiding me?" 

However, the time has not yet come to get rid of 
rhyme altogether: it has still plenty of possibilities, 
as Dumb Crambo at a Christmas party will soon con- 
vince the sceptical; and assonances separated even 
by the whole length of the mouth can work happily 
together, with or without the co-operation of ordinary 
rhyme. 

These are all merely illustrations of the general 
principle that as soon as a poem emerges from the 
hidden thought processes that give it birth, and the 
poet reviews it with the conscious part of his mind, 
then his task is one not of rules or precedents so much 
as of ordinary common-sense. 



XXXV 
IMPROVISING NEW CONVENTIONS 

THERE is a great dignity in poetry unaffectedly 
written in stern stiff traditional forms and 
we feel in spite of ourselves that we owe it 
the reverence due to ruined abbeys, prints of 
Fujiyama, or Chelsea pensioners with red coats, 
medals, and long white beards. But that is no 

[92] 



WHEN IN DOUBT 

reason for following tradition blindly; it should be 
possible for a master of words to improvise a new 
convention, whenever he wishes, that will give his 
readers just the same notion of centuried authority 
and smoothness without any feeling of contempt. 

XXXVI 
WHEN IN DOUBT 

A YOUNG poet of whose friendship I am very 
proud was speaking about poetry to one of 
those University literary clubs which regard 
English poetry as having found its culmination in the 
last decade of the nineteenth century and as having 
no further destiny left for it. He said that he was 
about to tell them the most important thing he knew 
about poetry, so having roused themselves from a 
customary languor, the young fellows were disap- 
pointed to hear, not a brilliant critical paradox or a 
sparkling definition identifying poetry with decay, 
but a mere rule of thumb for the working poet: 

When in Doubt 
Cut it Out. 



[93] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

XXXVII 
THE EDITOR WITH THE MUCKRAKE 

ORDINARY readers may deplore the habit of 
raking up the trivial and bad verse of good 
poets now long dead, but for living poets 
there is nothing more instructive in the world than 
these lapses, and in the absence of honest biography 
they alone are evidence for what would be naturally 
assumed, that these great poets in defiance of 
principle often tried to write in their dull moments 
just because they longed for the exquisite excitement 
of composition, and thought that the act of taking up 
a pen might induce the hypnotic state of which I have 
spoken. But afterwards they forgot to destroy what 
they produced, or kept it in the hope that it was some 
good after all. 

XXXVIII 
THE MORAL QUESTION 

MODERN treatises on Poetry usually begin 
with definitions; ancient treatises with 
a heavy weight of classical authority and 
a number of grave reflections on the nature of the 
Poet, proving conclusively that he should be a man 

[94] 



THE MORAL QUESTION 

of vast experience of life, apt judgment, versatile 
talent, and above all unimpeachable moral character. 
Authority seems to count for nothing in these days, 
compared with the value set on it by Sir Philip 
Sidney in his "Apologie for Poetrie," and the modern 
treatise would never ask its reader more than to 
admit a negative conclusion on the moral question, 
that poets who think they can combine indiscriminate 
debauch with dyspeptic Bohemian squalor and yet 
turn out good work merely by applying themselves 
conscientiously and soberly in working hours, are 
likely to be disappointed; however, my personal feel- 
ing is that poets who modify the general ethical prin- 
ciples first taught them at home and at school, can only 
afford to purchase the right to do so at a great price 
of mental suffering and difficult thinking. Wanton, 
lighthearted apostasies from tradition are always 
either a sign or a prophecy of ineffectual creative 
work. 

Art is not moral, but civilized man has invented the 
word to denote a standard of conduct which the mass 
demands of the individual and so poetry which makes 
a definitely anti-moral appeal is likely to antagonize 
two readers out of three straight away, and there is 
little hope of playing the confidence trick on an enemy. 
Being therefore addressed to a limited section even of 
the smallish class who read poetry, such poetry will 
tend like most high-brow art to have more dexterity 
than robustness. 

For a complete identification of successful art with 
[95] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 
morality I always remember with appreciation what 
an Irishman, a complete stranger, once said to my 
father on hearing that he was author of the song 
"Father O'Flynn" — "Ye behaved well, sir, when ye 
wrote that one." 



XXXIX 

THE POET AS OUTSIDER 

THE ethical problem is further complicated for 
poets by the tussle in their nature between 
the spontaneous and the critical biases. The 
principle of loyalty on which the present non- 
religious system of English manners depends is 
strained in them to breaking point by the tendency 
to sudden excitement, delight or disgust with ideas 
for which mature consideration entirely alters the val- 
ues, or with people who change by the same process 
from mere acquaintances to intimate friends and 
back in a flash. Which should explain many ap- 
parently discreditable passages in, for instance, the 
life and letters of Keats or Wordsworth, and should 
justify Walt Whitman's outspoken "Do I contradict 
myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am 
large, I contain multitudes." 

The poet is the outsider who sees most of the game, 
and, by the same token, all or nearly all the great 
English poets have been men either of ungenteel 

[96] 



A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

birth or of good family which has been scandalized 
by their subsequent adoption of unusual social habits 
during the best years of their writing. To the polite 
society of their day — outsiders to a man. 



XL 

A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

Dear Sir, — 

Many thanks for the volume of your poems you 
have sent me. Though I had never seen any of your 
compositions before, they are already old friends — 
that is, I like them but I see through them. 
Yours cordially, Etc. 



XLI 



FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE 
VERSE 

AS in household economics, you cannot take 
out of a stocking more than has been put 
in, so in poetry you cannot present suffer- 
ing or romance beyond your own experience. The 
attempt to do this is one of the chief symptoms of the 
fake poet; ignorance forces him to draw on the ex- 
perience of a real poet who actually has been through 
the emotional crises which he himself wants to re- 

[97] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

state. The fake is often made worse by the theft 
of small turns of speech which though not in any 
sense irregular or grotesque, the poet has somehow 
made his own; it is like stealing marked coins, and 
is a dangerous practice when Posterity is policeman. 
Most poets visit Tom Tiddler's ground now and then, 
but the wise ones melt down the stolen coin and im- 
press it with their own "character." 

There is a great deal of difference between fake 
poetry and ordinary bad poetry. The bad poet is 
likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply as the 
poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow 
been given the power of translating experience into 
images and emblems, or of melting words in the fur- 
nace of his mind and making them flow into the chan- 
nels prepared to take them. Charles Sorley said, 
addressing the good poets on behalf of the bad poets 
(though he was really on the other side) :— 

We are the homeless even as you, 

Who hope but never can begin. 
Our hearts are wounded through and through 

Like yours, but our hearts bleed within; 
We too make music but our tones 
Scape not the barrier of our bones. 

Mere verse, as an earlier section has attempted to 
show, is neither bad poetry nor fake poetry neces- 
sarily. It finds its own categories, good verse, bad 
verse and imitation. In its relation to poetry it 

[98] 



BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE 
stands as chimpanzee to man: only the theory that 
a conflict of emotional ideas is a necessary ingredi- 
ent of verse to make it poetry, will satisfactorily ex- 
plain why many kinds of verse, loosely called Poetry, 
such as Satire and Didactic verse are yet popularly 
felt not to be the "highest" forms of Poetry. I 
would say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred 
these bear no real relation to Poetry, even though 
dressed up in poetical language, and that in the hun- 
dredth case they are poetry in spite of themselves. 
Where the writer is dominated by only one aim, in 
satire, the correction of morals; in didactic verse, 
instruction; there is no conflict and therefore no 
poetry. But in rare cases where some Juvenal slips 
through feelings of compunction to a momentary 
mood of self-satire and even forgets himself so much 
as to compliment his adversary; or in didactic verse 
where a sudden doubt arises and the teacher admits 
himself a blind groper after truth (so Lucretius time 
and time again) and breaks his main argument in 
digressions after loveliness and terror, only then does 
Poetry appear. It flashes out with the surprise and 
shock of a broken electric circuit. 

Even the memoria technica can slide from verse 
into poetry. The rhyme to remember the signs of 
the Zodiac by, ends wonderfully : — 

The Ram the Bull, the Heavenly Twins, 
And next the Crab, the Lion shines, 
The Virgin and the Scales, 

[99] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

The Scorpion, Archer and He Goat, 
The Man who carries the Watering Pot, 
The Fish with glittering tails. 

The language of science makes a hieroglyphic, or 
says "The sign of Aquarius"; the language of prose 
says "A group of stars likened by popular imagery 
to a Water Carrier"; the language of Poetry converts 
the Eastern water carrier with his goatskin bag or 
pitcher, into an English gardener, then puts him to 
fill his watering pot from heavenly waters where the 
Fish are darting. The author of this rhyme has 
visualized his terrestrial emblems most clearly; he 
has smelt the rankness of the Goat, and yet in the 
"Lion shines" and the "glittering tails" one can see 
that he has been thinking in terms of stars also. The 
emotional contradiction lies in the stars' remote aloof- 
ness from complications of this climatic and smelly 
world, from the terror of Lion, Archer, Scorpion, 
from the implied love-interest of Heavenly Twins 
and Virgin, and from the daily cares of the Scales, 
Ram, Bull, Goat, Fish, Crab and Watering Pot. 

The ready way to distinguish verse from poetry is 
this. Verse makes a flat pattern on the paper, Poetry 
stands out in relief. 



[100] 



A DIALOGUE ON FAKE-POETRY 

XLII 
A DIALOGUE ON FAKE-POETRY 

QWHEN is a fake not a fake? 
A. When hard-working and ingenious 
conjurors are billed by common courtesy as 
'magicians.' 

Q. But when is a fake not a fake? 
A. When it's a Classic. 
Q. And when else? 

A. When it's "organ-music" and all that. - - 
Q. Elaborate your answer, dear sir! 
A. A fake, then, is not a fake when lapse of time 
has tended to obscure the original source of 
the borrowing, and when the textural and 
structural competence that the borrower 
has used in synthesising the occasional good 
things of otherwise indifferent authors is so 
remarkable that even the incorruptible Porter 
of Parnassus winks and says "Pass Friend!" 
Q. Then the Fake Poet is, as you have hinted be- 
fore, a sort of Hermit Crab? 
A. Yes, and here is another parable from Marine 
Life. Poetry is the protective pearl formed 
by an oyster around the irritations of a mag- 
got. Now if, as we are told, it is becoming 
[101] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

possible to put synthetic pearls on the market, 
which not even the expert with his X-ray can 
detect from the natural kind, is not our valua- 
tion of the latter perhaps only a sentimental- 
ity? 



XLIII 
ASKING ADVICE 

THERE is a blind spot or many blind spots in 
the critical eye of every writer; he cannot 
find for himself certain surface faults which 
anybody else picks out at once. Especially there is a 
bias towards running to death a set of words which 
when he found them, were quite honest and inoffen- 
sive. Shelley had a queer obsession about "caves," 
"abysses," and "chasms" which evidently meant for 
him much more than he can make us see. A poet will 
always be wise to submit his work, when he can do no 
more to straighten it, to the judgment of friends whose 
eyes have their blind spots differently placed; only, he 
must be careful, I suppose, not to be forced into mak- 
ing any alterations while in their presence. 

A poet reveals to a friend in a fit of excitement 
"I say, listen, I am going to write a great poem on 
such-and-such! I have the whole thing clear in my 
mind, waiting to be put down." But if he goes on 
to give a detailed account of the scheme, then the act 

[102] 



SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION 

of expression (especially prose expression) kills the 
creative impulse by presenting it prematurely with 
too much definiteness. The poem is never written. 
It remains for a few hopeless days as a title, a couple 
of phrases and an elaborate scheme of work, and is 
then banished to the lumber room of the mind; later 
it probably becomes subsidiary to another apparently 
irrelevant idea and appears after a month or two in 
quite a different shape, the elaboration very much 
condensed, the phrase altered and the title lost. 

Now this section is as suitable as any other for the 
prophecy that the study of Poetry will very soon 
pass from the hands of Grammarians, Prosodists, 
historical research men, and such-like, into those of 
the psychologists. And what a mess they'll make of 
it; to be sure! 



XLIV 
SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION 

THE later drafts of some lines I wrote re- 
cently called CYNICS AND ROMANTICS, 
and contrasting the sophisticated and ingenu- 
ous ideas of Love, give a fairly good idea of the con- 
scious process of getting a poem in order. I make no 
claim for achievement, the process is all that is in- 
tended to appear, and three or four lines are enough 
for illustration: 

[103] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 
1st Draft. 

In club or messroom let them sit, 
Let them indulge salacious wit 
On love's romance, but not with hearts 
Accustomed to those healthier parts 
Of grim self-mockery. . . . 

2nd Draft. (Consideration: — It is too 

soon in the poem for the angry jerkiness of "Let them 
indulge." Also "Indulge salacious" is hard to say; 
at present, this is a case for being as smooth as 
possible.) 

In club or messroom let them sit 
Indulging contraversial wit 
On love's romance, but not with hearts 
Accustomed. . . . 

3rd Draft. (Consideration: — No, we 

have the first two lines beginning with "In." It 
worries the eye. And "sit, indulging" puts two 
short "i's" close together. "Contraversial" is not 
the word. It sounds as if they were angry, but they 
are too blase for that. And "love's romance" is 
cheap for the poet's own ideal.) 

In club or messroom let them sit 
At skirmish of salacious wit 
Laughing at love, yet not with hearts 
Accustomed. ... 

[104] 



SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION 

4!th Draft, (Consideration: — Bother 

the thing! "Skirmish" is good because it suggests 
their profession, but now we have three S's, — "sit," 
"skirmish," "salacious." It makes them sound too 
much in earnest. The "salacious" idea can come in 
later in the poem. And at present we have two 
"at's" bumping into each other; one of them must 
go. "Yet" sounds better than "but" somehow.) 

In club or messroom let them sit 
With skirmish of destructive wit 
Laughing at love, yet not with hearts 
Accustomed. . . . 

5th Draft, (Consideration: — And now 

we have two "with's" which don't quite correspond. 
And we have the two short "i's" next to each other 
again. Well, put the first "at" back and change 
"laughing at" to "deriding.'" The long "i" is a 
pleasant variant; "laughing" and "hearts" have 
vowel-sounds too much alike.) 

In club or messroom let them sit 
At skirmish of destructive wit 
Deriding love, yet not with hearts 
Accustomed. . . . 

6th Draft. (Consideration: — Yes, that's 

a bit better. But now we have "(destructive" and 
^'c^eriding" too close together. "Ingenious" is more 
the word I want. It has a long vowel, and suggests 

[105] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

that it was a really witty performance. The two 
"in's" are far enough separated. "Accorded" is 
better than "accustomed"; more accurate and sounds 
better. Now then: — ) 

In club or messroom let them sit 
At skirmish of ingenious wit 
Deriding love, yet not with hearts 
Accorded etc. 

(Consideration: — It may be 
rotten, but I've done my best.) 

The discussion of more radical constructive faults 
is to be found in PUTTY and THE ART OF EX- 
PRESSION. 



XLV 
LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT 

IN this last section, besides an attempt at a 
greater accuracy of meaning and implication 
than the first slap-dash arrangement of words 
had provided, there may have been noticed three 
other technical considerations which are especially 
exacting in this case, where I am intending by par- 
ticularly careful craftsmanship to suggest the bril- 
liance of the conversation I am reporting. 

The first is a care to avoid unintentional echoes, 
[106] 



LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT 
as for example "/ti club or messroom. . . mdulging." 

The second is a care which all song writers and 
singing masters understand, to keep apart words like 
"indulge salacious," where the j and s sound coming 
together interfere with easy breathing. 

The third is an attempt to vary the vowel sounds 
so far as is consistent with getting the right shade 
of meaning; it pleases the mental ear like stroking 
pleases a cat (note the vowel sequence of the phrase 
that heads this section. John Milton knew a thing 
or two about texture, worth knowing). At the same 
time I am trying to arrange the position of con- 
sonants and open vowels with much the same care. 

But all these three considerations, and even the 
consideration for lucidity of expression, can and 
must be modified where an emotional mood of ob- 
scurity, fear, difficulty or monotony will be better 
illustrated by so doing. 

Keats was very conscious of the necessity of modi- 
fication. Leigh Hunt recounts in his Autobiog- 
raphy : — 

"I remember Keats reading to me with great rel- 
ish and particularity, conscious of what he had set 
forth, the lines describing the supper ^ and ending 
with the words, 

** 'And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.' " 

Mr. Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not 
varied enough; but Keats knew where his vowels 
were not to be varied. On the occasion above al- 

1 St. Agnes' Eve. 

[107] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

luded to, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition 
of the concluding sound of the participles in Shake- 
speare's line about bees: — 

" 'The singing masons building roofs of gold.' " 

This, he said, was a line which Milton would never 
have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that 
the repetition was in harmony with the continued 
note of the singers, and that Shakespeare's negligence, 
if negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in 
the best manner." 

Keats here was surely intending with his succession 
of short i-sounds, a gourmet's fastidious pursing of 
lips. Poets even of the Virgil-Milton-Tennyson-Long- 
fellow metrical tradition will on occasion similarly 
break their strict metric form with an obviously imita- 
tive "quadrepedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula cam- 
pum," but the manipulation of vowels and consonants 
is for them rather a study in abstract grandeur of 
music than a relation with the emotional content of 
the poetry. 



XLVI 
THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET 

NO poem can turn out respectably well unless 
written in the full confidence that this time 
at last the poet is going to attain perfect ex- 
pression. So long as this confidence survives^ he 

[108] 



THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET 

goes on revising the poem at intervals for days or 
months imtil nothing more can be done, and the 
inevitable sense of failure is felt, leaving him at 
liberty to try again. It is on this inevitable failure 
that the practice of every art is made conditional. 



A man once went into an ironmonger's shop and 
said hesitatingly, "Do you sell those gadgets for fix- 
ing on doors?" 

"Well, sir," replied the assistant, "I am not 
quite sure if I understand your requirements, but I 
take it you are needing a patent automatic door- 
closer?" 

"Exactly," said the customer. "One to fix on my 
pantry door which, by the way, contains a glass 
window." 

"You will want a cheap one, sir?" 

"Cheap but serviceable." 

"You will prefer an English make, sir?" 

"Indeed, that's a most important consideration." 

"You will perhaps want one with ornamentations, 
scroll work and roses for instance?" 

"Oh no, nothing of that sort, thank you. I want 
it as plain and unobtrusive as possible." 

"You would like it made of some rustless metal, 
sir?" 



"That would be very convenient. 
"And with a strong spring?" 
"Well, moderately strong." 
[109] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

"To be fixed on which side, sir?" 

"Let me see; the right-hand side." 

"Now, sir," said the assistant, "I will go through 
each point, one by one. You want an efficient (but 
not too costly) English made, unobtrusive, rustless, 
unomamented, patent automatic door closer, to be 
fixed right-handed with a moderately strong spring 
to a pantry door with a glass window. Is there any 
further desideratum, sir?" 

"Well, it's very good of you to help me like this 
("Not at all, sir"). I should like it easily adjusted 
and easily removed, and above all it must not squeak 
or need constant oiling." 

"In fact, sir, you want an apparatus combining a 
variety of qualities, in a word, an absolutely silent, 
efficient, economical, invisible, corrosive proof, un- 
omamented, not-too-heavily-springed, easily adjust- 
able, readily removable, British-made, right-handed, 
patent automatic door closer, ideally fitted in every 
possible respect for attaching to your pantry door 
which (I understand you to say) contains a glass 
window. How is that, sir?" 

"Splendid, splendid." 

"Well, sir, I regret that there has never been any 
article of that description put on the market, but if 
you care to visit our wholesale department across 
the road, you may perhaps be able to make your 
choice from a reasonably large selection of our 
present imperfect models. Good day, sir." 

[110] 



I 



SEQUELS ARE BARRED 

XLVII 

SEQUELS ARE BARRED 

F you solve a problem to the best of your ability, 
it never bothers you again. Enough said: but 
the following emblem may be taken to heart: — 

EPITAPH ON AN UNFORTUNATE ARTIST 

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits: 
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid. 

So in the end he could not change the tragic habits 
This formula for drawinor comic rabbits made. 



XLVIII 
TOM FOOL 

THERE is a saying that "More people know 
Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows"; that may 
be all right if it means recognizing him in the 
street, but he has to be a wonder before he can, with- 
out eccentricity, make his work immediately 
recognized in print and be even distinguishable from 
the best efforts of imitators. This proverb was 
obviously in the head of the man or woman who wrote 
the following sonnet, in the Spectator (I think) about 

[111] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

a year ago; I have lost the cutting and the reference, 
and ask to be pardoned if I misquote : — 

Cunning indeed Tom Fool must be to-day 

For us, who meet his verses in a book, 
To cry "Tom Fool wrote that ... I know his way. . . . 

. . . Unsigned, yet eyed all over with Tom's look, . . . 

Why see! It's pure Tom Fool, I'm not mistook 

Fine simple verses too; now who's to say 

How Tom has charmed these worn old words to obey 

His shepherd's voice and march beneath his crook? 
Instead we ponder "I can't name the man, 

But he's been reading Wilde," or "That's the school 
Of Coterie. . . Voices. . . Pound. . . the Sitwell clan. . . " 

'^He 'knows his Kipling' ". . . "/le accepts the rule 
Of Monro . . . of Lord Tennyson ... of Queen Anne" 

How seldom, "There, for a ducat, writes, 

TOM FooL. 

The writer evidently had a keen eye for the failings 
of others, but is convicted out of his own mouth, for 
I have met nobody who can identify this particular 
Tom Fool for me. 

Hateful as is the art of the parodist when it spoils 
poems which have delighted and puzzled us, parody 
has its uses. A convincing parody is the best possible 
danger signal to inform a poet that he is writing 
sequels, repeating his conjuring tricks until they can 
be seen through and ridiculously imitated. "That 
awkward fellow Ariphrades," much as we dislike 
him, is one of the most useful members of our 
republic of letters. 

[112] 



CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION 

XLIX 
CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION 

I HAVE already attempted to show Poetry as the 
Recorder's precis of a warm debate between 
the members of the poet's mental Senate on 
some unusually contraversial subject. Let the 
same idea be expressed less personally in the terms 
of coloured circles intersecting, the space cut off 
having the combined colour of both circles. In the 
Drama these circles represent the warring influences 
of the plot; the principal characters lie in the 
enclosed space and the interest of the play is to watch 
their attempts to return to the state of primary 
colouring which means mental ease; with tragedy they 
are eventually forced to the colourless blackness of 
Death, with comedy the warring colours disappear in 
white. In the lyrical poem, the circles are coinciding 
stereoscopically so that it is difficult to discover how 
each individual circle is coloured; we only see the 
combination. 

If we consider that each influence represented by 
these circles has an equivalent musical rhythm, then 
in the drama these rhythms interact orchestrally, 
tonic theme against dominant; in lyrical poetry where 
we get two images almost fused into one, the rhythms 
interlace correspondingly closely. Of the warring 

[113] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

influences, one is naturally the original steady-going 
conservative, the others novel, disquieting, almost 
accidental. Then in lyrical poetry the established in- 
fluence takes the original metre as its expression, 
and the new influences introduce the cross rhythm 
modifying the metre until it is half sub- 
merged. Shakespeare's developments of blank verse 
have much distressed prosodists, but have these ever 
considered that they were not mere wantonness or lack 
of thought, that what he was doing was to send 
emotional cross-rhythms working against the familiar 
iambic five-stress line? 

I remember "doing Greek iambics" at Charter- 
house and being allowed as a great privilege on 
reaching the Upper School to resolve the usual short- 
long foot into a short-short-short or even in certain 
spots into a long-short. These resolutions I never 
understood as having any reference to the emotional 
mood of the verse I was supposed to be translating, 
but they came in very conveniently when proper 
names had too many short syllables in them to fit 
otherwise. 

A young poet showed me a set of English verses the 
other day which I returned him without taking a copy 
but I remember reading somewhat as follows: — 

T-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum 
A midnight garden, where as I went past 
I saw the cherry's moonfrozen delicate ivory. 
[114] 



CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION 

"Good heavens," I said, "what's that last line all 
about?" 

"Oh, it's just an experiment in resolution." 

"Take a pencil, like a good fellow, and scan it for 
me in the old fashioned way as we used to do at school 
together." 

He did so: — 

I saw I the cherr | (y's) mo6nfroz|en del|ic(ate) iv|(ory) 

"It's a sort of anapaestic resolution," he explained. 

"Anapaestic resolution of what?" 

"Of an iambic decasyllabic line." 

"Excuse me, it's not. Since we're talking in that 
sort of jargon, it?'s a spondaic resolution of a dactylic 
line." 

"What do you mean?" 

"Well, you've put in four extra syllables for your 
resolution. I'll put in a fifth, the word "in." Now 
listen ! 

Swimmery | floatery | bobbery | duckery | divery — 

/ saw the | cherries moon | frozen in | delicate | ivory 

In this case the cross-rhythm, which my friend ex- 
plained was meant to suggest the curious ethereal look 
of cherry blossoms in moonlight, had so swamped the 
original metre that it was completely stifled. The 
poet has a licence to resolve metre where the emotion 
demands it, and he is a poor poet if he daren't use it; 
but there is commonsense in restraint. 

[115] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 



MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY 

ONE goes plodding on and hoping for a 
miracle, but who has ever recovered the 
strange quality that makes the early work 
(which follows a preliminary period of imitation) in 
a sense the best work? There is a fine single- 
heartedness, an economy of material, an adventurous 
delight in expression, a beginner's luck for which I 
suppose honest hard work and mature observation 
can in time substitute certain other qualities, but 
poetry is never the same again. 

I will attempt to explain this feeling by an analogy 
which can be pressed as closely as any one likes: it 
is an elaboration of what has been said of the poet as 
a "peculiarly gifted witch doctor." Cases of 
multiple personality have recently been investigated 
in people who believed themselves to be possessed by 
spirits. Analysis has proved pretty conclusively 
that the mediums have originally mimicked ac- 
quaintances whom they found strange, persons ap- 
parently selected for having completely different out- 
looks on life, both from the medium and from each 
other, different religions, different emotional proc- 
esses and usually different dialects. This mimicry 

[116] 



MY NAME IS LEGION 
has given rise to unconscious impersonations of these 
people, impersonations so complete that the medium 
is in a state of trance and unconscious of any other 
existence. Mere imitation changes to a synthetic 
representation of how these characters would act in 
given circumstances. Finally the characters get so 
much a part of the medium's self that they actually 
seem to appear visibly when summoned, and a sight 
of them can even be communicated to sympathetic by- 
standers. So the Witch of Endor called up Samuel 
for King Saul. The trances, originally spontaneous, 
are induced in later stages to meet the wishes of an 
inquisitive or devout seance-audience; the manifes- 
tations are more and more presented (this is no charge 
of charlatanism) with a view to their effect on the 
seance. It is the original unpremeditated trances, 
or rather the first ones that have the synthetic quality 
and are no longer mere mimicry, which correspond 
to Early Work. 

But it is hardly necessary to quote extreme cases 
of morbid psychology or to enter the dangerous arena 
of spiritualistic argument in order to explain the 
presence of subpersonalities in the poet's mind. 
They have a simple origin, it seems, as supplying the 
need of a primitive mind when confused. Quite 
normal children invent their own familiar spirits, 
their "shadows," "dummies" or "slaves," in order to 
excuse erratic actions of their own which seem on 
reflection incompatible with their usual habits or code 

[117] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

of honour. I have seen a child of two years old ac- 
cept literally an aunt's sarcasm, "Surely it wasn't my 
little girl who did that? It must have been a horrid 
little stranger dressed just like you who came in and 
behaved so badly. My little girl always does what 
she's told." The child divided into two her own 
identity of which she had only recently become con- 
scious. She expected sympathy instead of scolding 
when the horrid little stranger reappeared, broke 
china and flung water all over the room. I have 
heard of several developments of the dummy, or 
slave idea; how one child used his dummy as a 
representative to send out into the world to do the 
glorious deeds which he himself was not allowed to 
attempt; on one occasion this particular dummy got 
three weeks' imprisonment after a collision with the 
police and so complete was his master's faith in the 
independent existence of the creature that he eagerly 
counted the days until the dummy's release and would 
not call on his services, however urgently needed, until 
the sentence had been completed. Another child, a 
girl, employed a committee of several dummies each 
having very different characteristics, to whom all 
social problems were referred for discussion. 

Richard Middleton, the poet, in a short essay, 
"Harold," traces the development of a dummy of this 
sort which assumed a tyranny over his mind until it 
became a recurrent nightmare. Middleton says, and 
it immensely strengthens my contention if Middleton 
realized the full implications of the remark, that but 

[118] 



MY NAME IS LEGION 
for this dummy, Harold, he would never have become 
a poet. 

Two or three poets of my acquaintance have 
admitted (I can confirm it from my own experience) 
that they are frequently conscious of their own divided 
personalities; that is, that they adopt an entirely 
different view of life, a different vocabulary, gesture, 
intonation, according as they happen to find them- 
selves, for instance, in clerical society, in sporting 
circles, or among labourers in inns. It is no af- 
fectation, but a mimesis or sympathetic imitation 
hardened into a habit; the sportsman is a fixed and 
definite character ready to turn out for every sporting 
or quasi-sporting emergency and has no interest 
outside the pages of the Field, the clerical 
dummy pops up as soon as a clergyman passes down 
the road and can quote scripture by the chapter; the 
rustic dummy mops its brow with a red pocket hand- 
kerchief and murmurs "keeps very dry." These 
characters have individual tastes in food, drink, 
clothes, society, peculiar vices and virtues and even 
different handwriting. 

The difficulty of remaining loyal, which I mention 
elsewhere, is most disastrously increased, but the poet 
finds a certain compensation in the excitement of 
doing the quick change. He also finds it amusing to 
watch the comments of reviews or private friends on 
some small batch of poems which appear under his 
name. Every poem though signed John Jones is 
virtually by a different author. The poem which 

[119] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

comes nearest to the point of view of one critic may 
be obnoxious to another; and vice versa; but it all 
turns on which "dummy" or "sub-personality'^ had 
momentarily the most influence on the mental chair- 
man. 

In a piece which represents an interlude in a con- 
templated collection of poems, the following pas- 
sage occurs to give the same thought from a 
different angle. I am asking a friend to overlook 
irreconcilabilities in my book and refer him to two 
or three poems which are particularly hostile to each 
other. 

"Yet these are all the same stuff, really. 

The obverse and reverse, if you look closely. 

Of busy imagination's new-coined money — 

And if you watch the blind 

Phototropisms of my fluttering mind. 

Whether, growing strong, I wrestle Jacob-wise 

With fiendish darkness blinking threatfully 

Its bale-fire eyes. 

Or whether childishly 

'I dart to Mother -skirts of love and peace 

To play with toys until those horrors leave me. 

Yet note, whichever way I find release, 

By fight or flight, 

By being wild or tame, 

The Spirit's the same, the Pen and Ink's the same." 



[120] 



THE PIG BABY 

LI 

THE PIG BABY 



n 



M 



ULTIPLE personality, perhaps," says 
some one. "But does that account for 
the stereoscopic process of which you 
speak, that makes two sub-personalities speak from 
a double head, that as it were prints two pictures on 
the same photographic plate?" The objector is 
thereupon referred to the dream-machinery on which 
poetry appears to be founded. He will acknowledge 
that in dreams the characters are always changing in 
a most sudden and baffling manner. He will 
remember for example that in "Alice in Wonderland," 
which is founded on dream-material, the Duchess' 
baby is represented as turning into a pig; in "Alice 
through the Looking Glass" the White Queen becomes 
an old sheep. That is a commonplace of dreams. 
When there is a thought-connection of similarity 
or contrast between two concepts, the second is 
printed over the first on the mental photographic 
plate so rapidly that you hardly know at any given 
moment whether it is a pig or a baby you are 
addressing. "You quite make me giddy," said Alice 
to the Cheshire Cat who was performing similar 
evolutions. One image starts a sentence, another 
image succeeds and finishes it, almost, but the first 
reappears and has the last word. The result is 

[121] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

poetry — or nonsense. With music much the same 
happens; I believe that those wonderful bursts of 
music heard in sleep are impossible to reproduce in 
a waking state largely because they consist of a 
number of melodies of different times and keys 
imposed on one another. 



LII 

APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS 

IN my opening definition I have given rather an 
ideal of English Poetry than an analysis of the 
ruling poetics of this, that and the other century. 
If those who rally to the later Pope and those who find 
in the prophetic Blake the true standard of Poetry, 
equally deny that my definition covers their ex- 
perience of the word, I admit that in an encyclopediac 
sense it is quite inadequate, and indeed a fusion of 
two contradictory senses; indeed, again, a typically 
poetic definition. 

But how else to make it? Blake's poetry dictated 
by angels (a too-impulsive race) with its abstruse 
personal symbolism and tangled rhythms, and Pope's 
elegantly didactic generalizations, in rigidly metrical 
forms, on the nature of his fellow man, have 
a common factor so low as hardly to be worth re- 
covering; my justification is based on the works of 
our everywhere acknowledged Chaucer, Spenser, 

[122] 



APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS 

Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and the rest, where the 
baffling Metamorphism of Romance and the formal 
Characterism of Classical Poetry, often reconcile 
their traditional quarrel and merge contentedly and 
inseparably as Jack Spratt and Mrs. Spratt, dividing 
the fat and the lean in equable portions. 

Here let me then, for the scientific interest, sum- 
marize my conception of the typical poet: — 

A poet in the fullest sense is one whom some un- 
usual complications of early environment or mixed 
parentage develop as an intermediary between the 
small-group consciousnesses of particular sects, clans, 
castes, types and professions among whom he moves. 
To so many of these has he been formally enrolled as 
a member, and to so many more has he virtually 
added himself as a supernumerary member by show- 
ing a disinterested sympathy and by practising his ex- 
ceptionally developed powers of intuition, that in 
any small-group sense the wide diffusion of his loyal- 
ties makes him everywhere a hypocrite and a traitor. 

But the rival sub-personalities formed in him by 
his relation to these various groups, constantly 
struggle to reconciliation in his poetry, and in propor- 
tion as these sub-personalities are more numerous 
more varied and more inharmonious, and his con- 
trolling personality stronger and quicker at compro- 
mise, so he becomes a more or less capable spokes- 
man of that larger group-mind of his culture which 
we somehow consider greater than the sum of its 

[123] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

parts : so that men of smaller scope and more concen- 
trated loyalties swallow personal prejudices and hear 
at times in his utterances what seems to them the di- 
rect voice of God. 



LIII 
TIMES AND SEASONS 

EiCH poet finds that there are special times 
and seasons most suitable for his work; for 
times, I have heard mentioned with favour 
the hour before breakfast and the hour after the usual 
bed-time, for seasons, the pause between the ex- 
uberance of Spring and the heaviness of Summer 
seems popular, also the month of October. There are 
also places more free from interruption and dis- 
traction than others, such as caves, attics barely 
furnished, lonely barns, woods, bed, which make the 
hypnotic state necessary for poetry easier to induce. 
The poet has to be very honest with himself about 
only writing when he feels like it. To take pen in 
hand at the self-conscious hour of (say) nine A. M., 
for a morning's poetry, and with a mental arena free 
of combatants, is to be disappointed, and even "put 
off" poetry for some time to come. 

I have often heard it said that a poet in intervals 
between inspirations should keep his hand in by 
writing verse-exercises, but that he should on such 

[124] 



TWO HERESIES 

occasions immediately destroy what he has written. 
That seems all wrong, it is an insult to the spon- 
taneity of true poetry to go through a ritual farce of 
this sort and the poet will only be blunting his tools. 
He ought not to feel distressed at the passage of time 
as if it represented so many masterpieces unwritten. 
If he keeps mentally alive and has patience, the real 
stuff may arrive any moment; when it doesn't, it isn't 
his fault, but the harder he tries to force it, the longer 
will it be delayed. 



LIV 
TWO HERESIES 

AMONG the most usual heresies held about 
poetry is the idea that the first importance 
of the poet is his "message" ; this idea prob- 
ably originated with the decline of polite sermon- 
writing, when the poet was expected to take on the 
double duty; but it is quite untenable. The poet is 
only concerned with reconciling certain impressions 
of life as they occur to him, and presenting them in 
the most effective way possible, without reference to 
their educational value. The cumulative effect of 
his work is to suggest a great number of personal 
obsessions the sum of which compose if you like his 
"message," but the more definitely propagandist the 
poet, the less of a poet is the propagandist. 

[125] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

With this is bound up a heresy of about the same 
standing that poetry should only be concerned with 
presenting what is beautiful, beautiful in the limited 
sense of the picture-postcard. This romantic ob- 
session (using the word "romantic" in the sense of 
optimistic loose thinking) is as absurd as that of the 
blood-and-guts realists. Poetry is no more a nar- 
cotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bitter-sweet 
mixture for all possible household emergencies, and 
its action varies according as it is taken in a wine- 
glass or tablespoon, inhaled, gargled, or rubbed on 
the chest (like the literary Epic) by hard fingers 
covered with rings. 



LV 
THE ART OF EXPRESSION 

IT is as foolish to sneer at the Very Wild Men as 
it is to assume that the Very Tame Men are all 
right because they are "in the tradition." The 
Very Wild Men are at any rate likely to have done 
work which has explored the desert boundaries of the 
art they profess, and the Very Tame Men have never 
done anything worth doing at all. The only ex- 
cusable quarrel is with the pretended Wild Men who 
persist in identically repeating the experiments * i 
which their masters have already failed, and with 
those whose Very Wilderness is traceable to this — that 

[126] 



THE ART OF EXPRESSION 

they are satisfied with the original spontaneity of their 
work and do not trouble to test it in the light of what 
it will convey to others, whom they then blame for 
want of appreciation. What seems to be the matter 
with Blake's Prophetic Books is just this, he connected 
his images by a system of free association the clue to 
which was lost by his death: for instance his enemy, 
Schofield, a soldier who informed against him, 
suddenly enters "Jerusalem" and its strange company 
of abstractions, in the guise of a universal devil 
"Skofeld." 

Suppose that one Hodge, a labourer, attempted in 
a fit of homicidal mania to split my skull with a 
spade, but that my faithful bloodhound sprang to the 
rescue and Hodge barely escaped with his life. In 
my imagination, Hodge's spade might well come to 
symbolize murder and madness, while the bloodhound 
became an emblem of loyal assistance in the hour of 
discomfiture. With this experience in my mind I 
might be inclined to eulogize a national hero as 

"Bloodhound leaping at the throat of Hodge 
Who stands with lifted spade," i 

and convey a meaning directly contrary to the one 
intended and having an apparent reference to 
agrarian unrest. But conscious reflection would 
put my image into line with a more widely favoured 
conception of Man the Attacker, and Dog the Rescuer; 
I would rewrite the eulogy as 

[127] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

^Watchdog leaping at the burglar's throat 
Who stands with pistol aimed,'' 

One of the chief problems of the art of poetry is to 
decide what are the essentials of the image that has 
formed in your mind; the accidental has to be 
eliminated and replaced by the essential. There is 
the double danger of mistaking a significant feature 
of the image for an accident and of giving an 
accident more prominence than it deserves. 

Too much modern country-side poetry is mere 
verbal photography, admirably accurate and full of 
observation but not excited by memories of human 
relationships, the emotional bias which could make 
Bunyan see the bee as an emblem of sin, and Blake 
the lion's loving-kindness. 

Now, if Wordsworth had followed the poetical 
fashion of the day and told the world that when wan- 
dering lonely as a cloud he had seen a number of 
vernal flowers, the poem would have fallen pretty flat 
— if however, anticipating the present century he had 
quoted the order, the species and the subspecies and 
remarked on having found among the rest no fewer 
than five double blooms, we would almost liave 
wished the vernal flowers back again. 

Mr. Edmund Blunden lately called my attention to 
a message from Keats to John Clare sent through 
their common publisher, Taylor. Keats thought that 
Clare's "Images from Nature" were "too much in- 
troduced without being called for by a particular 

[128] 



GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN 

sentiment." Clare, in reply, is troubled that Keats 
shov/s the usual inaccuracies of the townsman when 
treating of nature, and that when in doubt he bor- 
rows from the Classics and is too inclined to see 
"behind every bush a thrumming Apollo." 



LVI 

GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN 

THE most popular theory advanced to account 
for the haunting of houses is that emana- 
tions of fear, hate or grief somehow im- 
pregnate a locality, and these emotions are released 
when in contact with a suitable medium. So with 
a poem or novel, passion impregnates the words and 
can make them active even divorced from the locality 
of creation. 

An extreme instance of this process was claimed 
when Mr. Thomas Hardy came to Oxford to receive 
his honorary degree as Doctor of Literature, in the 
Sheldonian Theatre. 

There were two very aged dons sitting together on 
a front bench, whom nobody in the assembly had ever 
seen before. They frowned and refrained from 
clapping Mr. Hardy or the Public Orator who had 
just described him as "Omnium poetarum Britan- 
nicorum necnon fabulatorum etiam facile princeps," 
and people said they were certainly ghosts and 

[129] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

identified them with those masters of colleges who 
failed to answer Jude the Obscure when he enquired 
by letter how he might become a student of the 
University. It seems one ought to be very careful 
when writing realistically. 



LVII 
THE LAYING ON OF HANDS 

WHILE still in my perambulator about the 
year 1899/ I once received with great 
alarm the blessing of Algernon Charles 
Swinburne who was making his daily journey from 
"The Pines" in Putney to the Rose and Crown public 
house on the edge of Wimbledon Common. It was 
many years before I identified our nursery bogey 
man, "mad Mr. Swinburne," with the poet. It in- 
terests me to read that Swinburne as a young man once 
asked and received the blessing of Walter Savage Lan- 
dor who was a very old man indeed at the time, and 
that Landor as a child had been himself taken to get a 
blessing at the hand of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that 
the great lexicographer in his childhood had been 
unsuccessfully "touched" by Queen Anne for the 
King's Evil. And what the moral may be, I cannot 
say, but I have traced the story back to Queen Anne 
because I want to make my grimace at the sacerdotal- 
1 See Mr. Max Beerbohm's AND EVEN NOW, page 69. 

[130] 



THE LAYING ON OF HANDS 
ists; for I must confess, I have been many times 
disillusioned over such "poetry in the great tradition" 
as Authority has put beyond criticism. 

In caution, and out of deference to my reader's 
sensibilities I will only quote a single example. 
Before reading a line of Swinburne I had been fre- 
quently told that he was "absolutely wonderful," I 
would be quite carried away by him. They all said 
that the opening chorus, for instance, of Atalanta in 
Calydon was the most melodious verse in the English 
language. I read: 

When the hounds of Spring are on Winter's traces, 
The Mother of months in meadow and plain, . . . 

and I was not carried away as far as I expected. 
For a time I persuaded myself that it was my own 
fault, that I was a Philistine and had no ear — but one 
day pride reasserted itself and I began asking myself 
whether in the lines quoted above, the two "in's" of 
Spring and Winter and the two "mo's" of Mother and 
Months did not come too close together for euphony, 
and who exactly was the heroine of the second line, 
and whether the heavy alliteration in m was not too 
obvious a device, and whether months was not rather 
a stumbling-block in galloping verse of this kind, and 
would it not have been better. . . . 

Thereupon faith in the "great tradition" and in 
"Authority" waned. 

Still, I would be hard-hearted and stiff-necked 
[131] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

indeed if I did not wish to have had on my own head 
the blessinsf that Swinburne received. 



LVIII 

WAYS AND MEANS 

IT is true that Genius can't lie hid in a garret 
nowadays; there are too many people eager to 
get credit for discovering and showing it to the 
world. But as most of the acknowledged best living 
poets find it impossible to make anything like a 
living wage from their poetry, and patronage has long 
gone out of fashion (a great pity I think) the poet 
after a little fuss and flattery is obliged to return dis- 
consolately to his garret. The problem of an 
alternative profession is one for which I have never 
heard a really satisfactory solution. Even Coleridge 
(whose Biographia Literaria should be the poet's 
Bible) could make no more hopeful suggestion than 
that the poet should become a country parson. 

Surely a most unhappy choice! The alternative 
profession should be as far as possible removed from, 
and subsidiary to, poetry. True priesthood will 
never allow itself to become subordinate to any other 
calling, and the dangerous consanguinity of poetry 
and religion has already been emphasized. It is the 
old difficulty of serving two masters; with the more 
orthodox poets Herbert and Vaughan, for example, 

[132] 



WAYS AND MEANS 
poetry was all but always tamed into meek subjection 
to religious propaganda; with Skelton and Donne it 
was very diflferent, and one feels that they were the 
better poets for their independence, their rebellious- 
ness towards priestly conventions. 

Schoolmastering is another unfortunate subsidiary 
profession, it is apt to give poetry a didactic flavour; 
journalism is too exacting on the invention, which the 
poet must keep fresh; manual labour wearies the 
body and tends to make the mind sluggish; office- 
routine limits the experience. Perhaps Chaucer as 
dockyard inspector and diplomat, Shakespeare as 
actor manager, and Blake as engraver, solved the 
problem at best. 

These practical reflections may be supplemented by 
a paragraph lifted from the New York Nation 
apropos of a trans-Atlantic poet whose works have 
already sold a million copies; a new volume of his 
poems has evidently broken the hearty muscular open- 
prairie tradition of the 'fifties and 'sixties and 
advanced forty years at a stride to the Parisian 
ecstasies of the naughty 'nineties; — 

"That verse is in itself a hopelessly unpopular 
form of literature is an error of the sophisticated 
but imperfectly informed. Every period has its 
widely read poets. Only, these poets rarely rise 
into the field of criticism since they always echo 
the music of the day before yesterday and express 
as an astonishing message the delusions of the 
huge rear-guard of civilization." 

[133] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

LIX 

POETRY AS LABOUR 

A BOOK of verses must be either priceless or 
valueless and as the general reading public 
is never told which by the council of critics 
until fifty years at least after the first publication, 
poets can only expect payment at a nominal rate. If 
they complain that the labourer is worthy of his hire, 
the analogy is not admitted. The public denies 
poetry to be labour; it is supposed to be a gentle rec- 
reation like cutting out "Home Sweet Home" from 
three-ply wood with a fretsaw, or collecting pressed 
flowers. 

LX 

THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE 

TO say of any poet that there is complete 
individuality in his poems combined with ex- 
cellent craftsmanship amounts to a charge of 
arrogance. Craftsmanship in its present-day sense 
seems necessarily to imply acquaintance with other 
poetry; polish is only learned from the shortcomings 
and triumphs of others, it is not natural to the back- 
woodsman. A poet who after reading the work of 
those whom he recognizes as masters of the craft, does 

[134] 



THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE 
not allow himself to be influenced into imitation of 
peculiar technical tricks (as we often find ourselves 
unwittingly influenced to imitate the peculiar gestures 
of people we admire or love), that poet must have 
the arrogance to put his own potential achievements 
on a level with the work he most admires. 

Then is asked the question, "But why do poets 
write? Why do they go on polishing the rough ideas 
which, once on paper, even in a crude and messy 
form, should give the mental conflict complete relief? 
Why, if the conflict is purely a personal one, do they 
definitely attempt to press the poem on their neigh- 
bour's imagination with all the zeal of a hot-gospel- 
ler?" 

There is arrogance in that, the arrogance of a child 
who takes for granted that all the world is interested 
in its doings and clever sayings. The emotional 
crises that make Poetry, imply suff'ering, and suff'ering 
usually humiliation, so that the poet makes his secret 
or open confidence in his poetic powers a set-off 
against a sense of alienation from society due to some 
physical deformity, stigma of birth or other early 
spite of nature, or against his later misfortunes in 
love. 

The expectation and desire of a spurious im- 
mortality "fluttering alive on the mouths of men" is 
admitted by most poets of my acquaintance, both the 
good and the bad. This may be only a more 
definitely expressed form of the same instinct for self- 
perpetuation that makes the schoolboy cut his name 

[135] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 
on the leaden gutter of the church porch, or the rich 
man give a college scholarship to preserve his name 
in perpetuo. But with the poet there is always the 
tinge of arrogance in the thought that his own poetry 
has a lasting quality which most of his contempo- 
raries cannot claim. 

The danger of this very necessary arrogance is that 
it is likely so to intrude the poet's personal eccen- 
tricities into what he writes that the reader recognizes 
them and does not read the "I" as being the voice of 
universality. ... It was the first night of a senti- 
mental play in an Early English setting; the crisis 
long deferred was just coming, the heroine and hero 
were on the point of reconciliation and the long 
embrace, the audience had lumps in their throats. 
At that actual instant of suspense, a man in evening- 
dress leaped down on the stage from a box, kicked 
the ruffed and doubleted hero into the orchestra, and 
began to embrace the lady. A moment's silence; 
then terrible confusion and rage. The stage manager 
burst into tears, attendants rushed forward to arrest 
the desperado. 

"But, ladies and gentlemen, I am the author!! I 
have an artist's right to do what I like with my own 
play." 

"Duck him! scratch his face! tar and feather him!" 

Arrogance? Yes, but a self-contradictory arro- 
gance that takes the form of believing that there is 
nobody beside themselves who could point out just 

[136] 



IN PROCESSION 

where in a given poem they have written well, and 
Vv^here badly. They know that it contains all sorts of 
hidden lesser implications (besides the more im- 
portant ones) which, they think, a few sensitive minds 
may feel, but none could analyze ; they think that they 
have disguised this or that bit of putty (of which no 
poem is innocent) so that no living critic could detect 
it. They are arrogant because they claim to under- 
stand better than any rivals how impossible an art 
poetry is, and because they still have the courage to 
face it. They have most arrogance before writing 
their poem of the moment, most humility when they 
know that they have once more failed. 

LXI 
IN PROCESSION 

THIS piece was written a few weeks after the 
remainder of the book: I had no cold-blooded 
intention of summarizing the paradox of 
poetic arrogance contained in the last section, but 
so it happened, and I print it here. 

Donne (for example's sake) 

Keats, Marlowe, Spenser, Blake, 

Shelley and Milton, 

Shakespeare and Chaucer, Skelton — 

I love them as I know them, 

But who could dare outgo them 

At their several arts 

At their particular parts 

[137] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

Of wisdom, power and knowledge? 

In the Poet's College 

Are no degrees nor stations, 

Comparisons, rivals, 

Stem examinations, 

Class declarations, 

Senior survivals; 

No creeds, religions, nations 

Combatant together 

With mutual damnations. 

Or tell me whether 

Shelley's hand could take 

The laurel wreath from Blake? 

Could Shakespeare make the less 

Chaucer's goodliness? 

The poets of old 
Each with his pen of gold 
Gloriously writing 
Found no need for fighting, 
In common being so rich; 
None need take the ditch. 
Unless this Chaucer beats 
That Chaucer, or this Keats 
With other Keats is flyting: 
See Donne deny Donne's feats, 
Shelley take Shelley down, 
Blake snatch at his own crown. 
Without comparison aiming high, 
Watching with no jealous eye, 
A neighbour's renown, 
Each in his time contended 
But with a mood late ended, 
Some manner now put by. 
Or force expended, 

[1381 



IN PROCESSION 

Sinking a new well when the old ran dry. 

So, like my masters, I 

Voice my ambition loud, 

In prospect proud, 

Treading the poet's road, 

In retrospect most humble 

For I stumble and tumble^ 

I spill my load. 

But often half-way to sleep, 

On a mountain shagged and steep, 

The sudden moment on me comes 

With terrible roll of dream drums. 

Reverberations, cymbals, horns replying, 

When with standards flying, 

A cloud of horsemen behind. 

The coloured pomps unwind 

The Carnival wagons 

With their saints and their dragons 

On the screen of my teeming mind, 

The Creation and Flood 

With our Saviour's Blood 

And fat Silenus' flagons, 

With every rare beast 

From the South and East, 

Both greatest and least, 

On and on. 

In endless variable procession. 

I stand on the top rungs 

Of a ladder reared in the air 

And I speak with strange tongues 

So the crowds murmur and stare, 

Then volleys again the blare 

Of horns, and Summer flowers 

Fly scattering in showers, 

And the Sun rolls in the sky, 

[139] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

While the drums thumping by 
Proclaim me. . . . 

Oh then, when I wake 
Could I recovering take 
And propose on this page 
The words of my rage 
And my blandishing speech 
Steadfast and sage, 
Could I stretch and reach 
The flowers and the ripe fruit 
Laid out at the ladder's foot, 
Could I rip a silken shred 
From the banner tossed ahead. 
Could I call a double flam 
From the drums, could the Goat 
Horned with gold, could the Ram 
With a flank like a barn-door 
The dwarf and blackamoor. 
Could Jonah and the Whale 
And the Holy Grail 
With the ''Sacking of Rome' 
And ''Lot at his home'' 
The Ape with his platter, 
Going clitter-clatter. 
The Nymphs and the Satyr, 
And every other such matter 
Come before me here 
Standing and speaking clear 
With a "how do ye do?" 
And "who are ye, who?" 
Could I show them to you 
That you saw them with me. 
Oh then, then I could be 
The Prince of all Poetry 
With never a peer, 

[140] 



IN PROCESSION 

Seeing my way so clear 
To unveil mystery. 

Telling you of land and sea 

Of Heaven blithe and free, 

How I know there to be 

Such and such Castles built in Spain, 

Telling also of Cockaigne 

Of that glorious kingdom, Cand 

Of the Delectable Land, 

The Land of Crooked Stiles, 

The Fortunate Isles, 

Of the more than three score miles 

That to Babylon lead, 

A pretty city indeed 

Built on a foursquare plan. 

Of the land of the Gold Man 

Whose eager horses whinney 

In their cribs of gold. 

Of the lands of Whipperginny 

Of the land where none grow old. 

Especially I could tell 

Of the Town of Hell, 

A huddle of dirty woes 

And houses in endless rows 

Straggling across all space; 

Hell has no market place. 

Nor point where four ways meet, 

Nor principal street. 

Nor barracks, nor Town Hall, 

Nor shops at all. 

Nor rest for weary feet, 

Nor theatre, square or park, 

Nor lights after dark 

[141] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

Nor churches nor inns, 

Nor convenience for sins, 

Hell nowhere begins. 

Hell nowhere ends, 

But over the world extends 

Rambling, dreamy, limitless, hated well; 

The suburbs of itself, I say, is Hell. 

But back to the sweets 

Of Spenser and Keats 

And the calm joy that greets 

The chosen of Apollo! 

Here let me mope, quirk, holloa 

With a gesture that meets 

The needs that I follow 

In my own fierce way. 

Let me be grave-gay 

Or merry-sad, 

Who rhyming here have had 

Marvellous hope of achievement 

And deeds of ample scope. 

Then deceiving and bereavement 

Of this same hope. 



[142] 



APPENDIX:— THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION 

The following letter I reprint from Tract No. 6 
issued by the Society for Pure English, but put it as 
an appendix because it explains my attitude to the 
careful use of language by prose writers as well as 
by poets. It is intended to be read in conjunction 
with my section on Diction, 

To the Editor of the S. P. E. tracts. 

Sir, 
As one rather more interested in the choice, use, and 
blending of words than in the niceties of historical 
grammar, and having no greater knowledge of 
etymology than will occasionally allow me to question 
vulgar derivations of place-names, I would like to 
sound a warning against the attempt to purify the 
language too much — "one word, one meaning" is as 
impossible to impose on English as "one letter, one 
sound." By all means weed out homophones, and 
wherever a word is overloaded and driven to death let 
another bear part of the burden; suppress the bastard 
and ugly words of journalese or commerce; keep a 
watchful eye on the scientists; take necessary French 
and Italian words out of their italics to give them an 
English spelling and accentuation; call a bird or a 
flower by its proper name, revive useful dialect or 
obsolescent words, and so on; that is the right sort of 

[143] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

purification, but let it be tactfully done, let the Dic- 
tionary be a hive of living things and not a museum of 
minutely ticketed fossils. A common-sense precision 
in writing is clearly necessary; one has only to read a 
page or two of Nashe, Lyly, or (especially) the lesser 
Euphuists to come to this conclusion; their sentences 
often can have meant no more to themselves than a 
mere grimace or the latest sweep of the hat learned in 
Italy. A common-sense precision, yes, but when the 
pedantic scientist accuses the man in the street of ver- 
bal inexactitude the latter will do well to point out to 
the scientist that of all classes of writers, his is the 
least accurate of any in the use of ordinary words. 
Witness a typical sentence, none the better for being 
taken from a book which has made an extremely im- 
portant contribution to modern psychological research, 
and is written by a scientist so enlightened that, 
dispensing almost entirely with the usual scientific 
jargon, he has improvised his own technical 
terms as they are needed for the argument. 
Very good words they are, such as would 
doubtless be as highly approved by the Society for 
Pure English, in session, as they have been by the 
British Association. This Doctor X is explaining the 
unaccountable foreknowledge in certain insects of the 
needs they will meet after their metamorphosis from 
grub to moth. He writes: 

. . . This grub, after a life completely spent within 
the channels in a tree-trunk which it itself manu- 
factures. . . . 

[144] 



APPENDIX:— DANGERS OF DEFINITION 

"Yes," said Doctor X to me, "somehow the two it's 
coming together look a bit awkward, but I have had a 
lot of trouble with that sentence and I came to the con- 
clusion that I'd rather have it clumsy than obscure." 
I pointed out have the "tree-trunk which''' was surely 
not what he meant, but that the faults of the sentence 
lay deeper than that. He was using words not as 
winged angels always ready to do his command, but 
as lifeless counters, weights, measures, or automatic 
engines wrongly adjusted. A grub cannot manU' 
facture a channel. Even a human being who can 
manufacture a boot or a box can only scoop 
or dig a channel. And you can only have 
a channel on the outer surface of a tree; inside 
a tree you have tunnels. A tunnel you drive 
or bore, A grub cannot be within either a 
channel or a tunnel (surely) in the same way as a fly 
is found within a piece of amber. Doctor X excused 
himself by saying that "scientists are usually function- 
ally incapable of visualization," and that "normal 
mental visualization is dangerous, and abnormal visu- 
alization fatal to scientific theorizations, as olfermg 
tempting vistas of imaginative synthetical concepts un- 
confirmed by actual investigation of phenomena" — or 
words to that effect. Unaware of the beam in his own 
eye, our Doctor complains more than once in his book 
of the motes in the public eye, of the extended popular 
application of scientific terms to phenomena for which 
they were never intended, until they become like so 
many blunted chisels. On the other hand, he would 

[145] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 
be the first to acknowledge that over-nice definition is, 
for scientific purposes, just as dangerous as blurring 
of sense ; Herr Einstein wasi saying only the other day 
that men become so much the slaves of words that the 
propositions of Euclid, for instance, which are abstract 
processes of reason only holding good in reference to 
one another, have been taken to apply absolutely in 
concrete cases, where they do not. Over-definition, I 
am trying to show, discourages any progressive under- 
standing of the idea for which it acts as hieroglyph. 
It even seems that the more precisely circumscribed a 
word, the less accurate it is in its relation to other 
closely-defined words. 

There is a story of a governess who asked her 
charges what was the shape of the earth? "It may 
conveniently be described as an oblate spheroid" was 
the glib and almost mutinous answer. "Who told you 
girls that?" asked the suspicious Miss Smithson. A 
scientific elder brother was quoted as authority, 
but Miss Smithson with commendable common sense 
gave her ruling, "Indeed that may be so, and it may 
be not, but it certainly is nicer for little girls to say 
that the earth is more or less the shape of an orange." 

From which fruit, as conveniently as from anywhere 
else, can be drawn our homely moral of common sense 
in the use of words. As every schoolboy I hope 
doesn't know, the orange is the globose fruit of that 
rutaceous tree the citrus aurantium, but as every 
schoolboy certainly is aware, there are several 
kinds of orange on the market, to wit the 

[146] 



APPENDIX:— DANGERS OF DEFINITION 

ordinary everyday sweet orange from Jaffa or 
Jamaica, the bitter marmalade orange that either 
comes or does not come from Seville, the 
navel orange, and the excellent "blood," with 
several other varieties. Moreover the orange 
has as many points as a horse, and parts or processes 
connected with its dissection and use as a motor- 
bicycle. "I would I were an Orange Tree, that busie 
Plante," sighed George Herbert once. I wonder how 
Herbert would have anatomized his Orange, then a 
rarer fruit than today when popular affection and 
necessary daily intercourse have wrapped the orange 
with a whole glossary of words as well as with tissue- 
paper. Old gentlemen usually pare their oranges, 
but the homophonic barrage of puns when Jones pere 
prepares to pare a pair of — even oranges (let alone 
another English-grown fruit), has taught the younger 
generations either to peel a norange or skin their 
roranges. Peel (subst.) is ousting rind; a pity be- 
cause there is also peal as a homophone; but I am 
glad to say that what used to be called divisions are 
now almost universally known as fingers or pigs (is 
the derivation from the tithe-or parson's pig known 
by its extreme smallness?) ; the seeds are "pips," and 
quite rightly too, because in this country they are 
seldom used for planting, and "pip''' obviously means 
that when you squeeze them between forefinger and 
thumb they are a useful form of minor artillery; then 
there is the white pithy part under the outer rind; I 
have heard this called blanket, and that is pretty 

[147] 



ON ENGLISH POETRY 

good, but I have also heard it called kill-baby, and 
that is better; for me it will always remain kill-baby. 
On consulting Webster's International Dictionary I 
find that there is no authority or precedent for calling 
the withered calix on the orange the kim, but I have 
done so ever since I can remember, and have heard 
the word in many respectable nurseries (it has a 
fascination for children), and I can't imagine it 
having any other name. Poetical wit might call it 
"the beauty-patch on that fairy orange cheek"; 
heraldry might blazon it, on tenne, as a mullet, vert, 
for difference; and contemporary slang would 
probably explain it as that "rotten little star-shaped 
gadget at the place where you shove in your lump of 
sugar"; but kim is obviously the word that is wanted, 
it needs no confirmation by a Dictionary Revisal 
Committee or National Academy. There it is, you 
can hardly get away from it. Misguided supporters 
of the Society for Pure English, resisting the impulse 
to say casually "the yellow stuff round my yorange" 
and "the bits inside, what you eat," and knowing bet- 
ter than to give us exocarp, carpel, and ovule, will, 
however, perhaps misunderstand the aims of the So- 
ciety by only using literary and semi-scientific lan- 
guage, by insisting on paring the integument and 
afterwards removing the divisions of their fruit for 
mastication. But pure English does not mean putting 
back the clock; or doing mental gymnastics. Let 
them rather (when they don't honestly push in that 
lump of sugar and suck) skin off the rind, ignoring 

[148] 



APPENDIX:— DANGERS OF DEFINITION 

the kim and scraping away the kill-baby, then pull out 
the pigs, chew them decently, and put the pips to their 
proper use. 

Good English surely is clear, easy, unambiguous, 
rich, well-sounding, but not self-conscious; for too 
much pruning kills. . . . 



THE END 



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